with great felicity compares the poetic descriptions of Nature left us by Indians and Persians, Hebrews and Arabs, Greeks and Romans, and the literatures of modern Europe. But his point of view, though not quite so passive as that of Montesquieu, though not directly intimating the creation of human ideas by physical forces, is that of the physical, not of the human, world. It is one thing to watch the effects of Indian or Italian scenery as they disclose themselves in Sanskrit or Italian poetry; it is another to observe the different aspects under which the same physical environment presents itself to social groups differently organised. The latter is the study to which at present we propose to direct attention—the sentiment of Nature as dependent on social organisation, that of the clan in particular.
We must at the outset carefully distinguish the two faces which early social conditions present—that of the clan and that of the chief's hall, the communal poetry of the Hebrew or the Arab, and the heroic songs of Homeric aoidoi or of Saxon Scôps. Nature presents herself in different garb to the village community and the household of the chief. To the former she is the maker of the harvest, the bounteous giver or the offended with-holder of the corn and wine and oil; the whole community lives in constant companionship with her, and (as the Hebrew when he spoke of sunrise as the sun's "going forth," like man to his labour, and sunset as the sun's "coming in," like man to his rest) transfer to her the associations of their agricultural life. To the household and retainers of the chief she is less interesting than the ancestor from whom the chief derives his divine lineage, or the deeds of martial prowess in which he and his immediate following take pride. The epic rhapsodist may, indeed, clothe his heroes in the dress of Nature's
