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§ 76. Israel and Hellas have respectively offered us examples of world-literature in which the social and individual spirits predominate, the characteristics of Indian literature may be found in its apparently peaceful union of these conflicting spirits, accompanied by a sentiment of the beautiful in nature equally removed from the humanising nature-poetry of the Greek and the monotheistic feelings of the Hebrew, who heard the voice of Yâhveh in the thunder, and saw his arrows in the lightning shot forth on the wings of the wind. But in its earliest beginnings Indian literature contained little indication of the widely philosophic course it was to pursue, or the union of the individual and social spirits it was to attain.

Taking a bird's-eye view of Indian development—for it is a mere error of ignorance to suppose that the East in general, and India in particular, have always been the home of social stagnation—we may divide it into certain periods derived either from social or linguistic facts. In the earliest, or Vedic, age (so called from the collection