“AVE, MARIS STELLA.”
One of the titles which the Roman Catholic world applied to the Mother of Jesus, in the Middle Ages, was “Stella Maris,” “Star of the Sea.” Columbus, being a Catholic, sang this hymn, or caused it to be sung, every evening, it is said, during his perilous voyage to an unknown land. The marine epithet by which the Virgin Mary is addressed is admirable as a stroke of poetry, and the hymn—of six stanzas—is a prayer which, though offered to her as to a divine being, was no doubt sincere in the simple sailor hearts of 1492.
The two following quatrains finish the voyagers' petition, and point it with a doxology—
Vitam praesta puram,
Iter para tutum,
Ut videntes Jesum
Semper collaetemur.
Sit laus Deo Patri,
Summo Christo decus,
Spiritui Sancto,
Tribus honor unus!
A free translation is—
Guide us safe, unspotted
Through life's long endeavor
Till with Thee and Jesus
We rejoice forever.
Praise to God the Father,
Son and Spirit be;
One and equal honor
To the Holy Three.
Inasmuch as this ancient hymn did not attain the height of its popularity and appear in all the breviaries until the 10th century, its assumed age has been doubted, but its reputed author, Venantius Fortunatus, Bishop of Poitiers, was born about 531, at Treviso, Italy, and died about 609. Though a religious teacher, he was a man of romantic and convivial instincts—a strange compound of priest, poet and beau chevalier. Duffield calls him “the last of the classics and first of the troubadours,” and states that he was the “first of the Christian poets to begin that worship of the Virgin Mary which rose to a passion and sank to an idolatry.”