moreover, is supplemented by a wide difference in the spirit of the pieces which are professedly religious compared with the Indian hymns. It is the ancestral worship of the family which is celebrated in the Sacrificial Odes of the Shih, a worship destined to afford no scope for the development of caste or Bráhman priesthood; and, though some of the odes are in worship of Nature, they remind us rather of the utilitarian mythology of early Rome than the splendid adoration of Nature in the Vedas. Not that Nature is less prominent in the Shih than in the Indian hymns; for there is scarcely an ode of the Shih which does not turn upon some aspect of Nature—"the ospreys with their kwan-kwan on the islet in the river," "the yellow birds flying about the spreading dolichos." Almost every ode is decked with phrases borrowed from physical or animal life—"the swallows flying about with their wings unevenly displayed," "the wind that blows with clouds of dust," "the dead antelope in the wild wrapped up in the white grass." But in these and similar expressions we have rather simple family life enjoying the sights and sounds of Nature than any of that majestic imagery and profound reverence for Nature's life which the Sanskrit poems reveal. The same homely sympathy with Nature is to be found in certain specimens of ancient Chinese poetry, which have been assigned (but on questionable grounds, in Dr. Legge's opinion) as high or even higher antiquity than the Shih King. Among these may be quoted the "Song of the Peasants in the time of Yaou:"—
"We rise at sunrise,
We rest at sunset,
Dig wells and drink,
Till our fields and eat—
What is the strength of the emperor to us?"
And from the same specimens the "Prayer at the
