The Latin Hymn-writers and Their Hymns

by Samuel Willoughby Duffield

TELLURIS INGENS CONDITOR.

Thou mighty Maker of earth’s frame,

Who gavest land and sea their name,

Hast swept the waters to their bound,

And fixed for aye the solid ground.

That soon upspringing should be seen

The herb with blossoms gold and green,

And fruit which ripely hangeth there,

And grass to which the herds repair.

Relieve the sorrows of the soul!

Our wounded spirits make thou whole,

That tears may sinful deeds allay,

And cleanse all baser lusts away.

Let us be swayed by thy decree,

From many evils set us free;

With goodness fill the waiting heart,

And keep all fear of death apart!

To the same sixth century belong some notable hymns which have not even a school to which to assign their paternity. The most famous of these is the

Ad coenam Agni providi,

which has been twice rewritten in conformity with the laws of classic prosody, reappearing in the Roman Breviary as the Ad regias Agni dapes, and in the Paris Breviary as the Forti tegente brachio. In English there have been at least twelve versions since 1710. The great merit of the hymn is the vigorous and terse way in which the mystical correspondence of the Christian sacrament to the Jewish passover, and of our deliverance from the yoke of Satan to the Jewish deliverance from the Egyptian bondage, are worked out. As Daniel suggests, its first stanza refers to the old usage that the catechumens, who had received baptism just before Easter, partook of the other sacrament on the first Sunday after Easter (Dominicus in albis), wearing the white robes of their baptism (stolis albis candidi). Another notable but fatherless hymn of this age is the Sanctorum meritis inclyta gaudiis—a beautiful commemoration of the martyrs whose sufferings were still so vividly remembered by the Church. Quite worthy of mention also is the Lenten hymn, Jam Christe, sol justitiae, which expresses the early Christian attitude toward God’s works, connecting the looked-for Easter with the renewal of the world by the spring—

“Dies venit, dies tua

In qua reflorent omnia.”

The hymn for All Saints Day, Psallat plebis sexus omnis voce corde carmina, is notable not only for its own vigor, but as being one of the oldest in which the alliterative principle of the early Celtic and Teutonic verse is employed in Latin. It therefore comes from the North of Europe, with the chances in favor of Ireland.

Of known but less important hymn-writers of the sixth century we have only two, Columba and Flavius. The former is the great Irish missionary known to his countrymen as Columcille (the Dove, or the Dove of the Church), who lived A.D. 521 to 597. He was one of the O’Donnells of Donegal, whose chiefs, something more than seventy years before his birth, had offered especial opposition to Patrick’s preaching. He studied in the great school founded at Clonard, on the upper waters of the Boyne, by Finnian, the first of those teachers who made the Ireland of this and the following centuries “the land of schools,” to which students flocked from Great Britain and even the Continent. Finnian sent him to Clonfad to obtain ordination as a bishop; but the bishop, who was ploughing in the field when he came, made a mistake and gave him ordination as a priest. And he never rose higher than this in hierarchical dignity. Not that it mattered much in the very elastic system of Church government Patrick had established in Ireland. The tribal or sept system was copied in the Church arrangement. At the head of each church sept stood a coarb, who might be a woman, and frequently was a priest or deacon. Under this jurisdiction the bishops took the same relative place that the bards held to the chiefs in the civil tribes. Sometimes there would be a dozen of these right reverend fathers in God in one small Irish town, all under the direction of a female coarb, miscalled an abbess by later authors, as the Church sept has been miscalled a monastery.

As a penance for having been the cause of a faction fight or civil war—one hardly knows which to call it—over the ownership of a psalter, Columba banished himself from Ireland and took up his abode at Iona (or Hy), from which centre he preached the Gospel to the Scots (i.e., Irish) and Picts (i.e., Welsh) of the Highlands and the Western Islands. The former had conquered this region in the fifth century and were yet to give their name to the whole country, although up to A.D. 1198 there is no instance of Scotus meaning Scotchman rather than Irishman. But while Christianity had penetrated even the wilds of Donegal in Ireland, these Irish of Scotland and their Cymric subjects still were pagans. So as Patrick was Scotland’s gift to Ireland, Columcille was Ireland’s to Scotland. He was the type of those persuasive and successful missionaries which the Church of Patrick sent through Great Britain and to the Continent. He used the power of song very freely in his missionary labors, confounding the Druids and attracting the people by the grave, sweet melody of the Church’s chants. Like Whitefield and Summerfield, he had a wonderful, because pure voice and could sing so as to be heard a mile away. He, too, was a poet of no mean merit. The sorrows of his voluntary exile from the land of his birth—the land which exercises such a weird fascination over her children that all other lands are to her what prose is to poetry or water to wine—seem to have wakened in him the gift of song. Less beautiful than these patriotic elegies is the abecedarian hymn on the spiritual history of our world, Altus prositor, vetustus dierum, et ingenitus, which is given in the Appendix to the Lyra Sacra Hibernica (Belfast, 1879) and in the second part of Dr. J. H. Todd’s Liber Hymnorum. It is written in a very rude Latinity, and is intended for instruction and edification rather than lyric expression. But it is an interesting monument of the faith of the great missionary, as it brings us nearer him than does the wonderful biography by Abbot Adamnan, his seventh successor at Iona. It was first printed in 1657 by the Irish scholar Colgan, and with it two other and shorter hymns (In Te, Christe, credentium and Noli, Pater, indulgere), which also may be Columcille’s.

Flavius was Bishop of Chalons in the year 580, and has left one hymn, Tellus et aeth’ra jubilent, which Daniel calls an excellent poem (carmen eximium). Its theme is our Lord’s washing the feet of the Apostles, and for this reason it was commonly sung after meals in some monasteries.

Of the seventh century, the century of Heraclius and Mahomet, there is not one great hymn-writer known as such, but there are some great hymns. The greatest is the Urbs beata Hirusalem, dicta pacis visio, of which the Angulare fundamentum is a part, and which is of the seventh or eighth century. Daniel, however, with the support of Schlosser, regards this hymn as not certainly older than the tenth century, and has Neale’s support in asserting that the last two verses are a later addition to give it suitableness for singing at a dedication of a church.[24] The earliest mention of its use in the tenth century is in the church of Poitiers at the annual blessing of the font on Easter Sunday, which tends to confirm the supposition that two verses have been added. He thinks it of Spanish origin, as the metrical form is one usual in the Mozarabic Breviary. In later days it underwent three revisions. In the old Paris Breviary of 1527 it becomes the Urbs Jerusalem beata; in the new Breviary of 1736 it becomes the Urbs beata, vera pacis visio under the hands of Abbé Besnault (ob. 1726). In the Roman Breviary of 1631 it is the Coelestis Urbs Jerusalem, the form, as usual, best known to modern readers and translators, but not the best worth knowing. Along with the Urbs beata we may place the Gloriosa Jerusalem, probably of Spanish origin, and of the same century as well as similar in contents, but unequal in beauty and poetic worth.

Next in worth is the abecedarian judgment hymn, Apparabet repentina dies magna Domini, which Neale speaks of as containing the germ of the Dies Irae. It is little more than a rehearsal in a trochaic metre of our Lord’s prediction of the Day of Judgment. It follows the Scripture text much more closely than does Thomas of Celano. Bede mentions it in the next century. Mrs. Charles has translated it.

To this seventh century or the next Mone refers the Salvator mundi, Domine, which is most probably an Anglo-Saxon hymn, although of the Ambrosian school. It reappears in the Anglican Orarium of 1560 and the Preces Privatae of 1564, and is said to have been familiar to Sir Thomas Browne and Bishop Ken through its use at Wykeham’s school in Winchester. It, along with the Te lucis ante terminum, also sung at Winchester, may have suggested both Bishop Ken’s “Glory to thee, my God, this night,” and Browne’s “The night is come, like to the day,” given in his Religio Medici. To the seventh century we also may refer the Quicunque vultesse salvus, a hymn better known as the Athanasian Creed.

Besides these there are two groups of hymns whose temporal limits do not lie within the seventh century on either side, but which may be as well discussed here as anywhere. The first are the early Spanish hymn-writers. We know by name three of the seventh century. The first is Isidore, Archbishop of Seville (570-636), the scholar of encyclopaedic range, who did so much to adapt the learning of the Romans to the wants of the Gothic community in Spain. To him are ascribed, somewhat doubtfully, three ballad-hymns in honor of as many martyrs and two abecedarian poems on repentance. More certainly authentic are three or four ascribed to his contemporary Eugenius, who was Archbishop of Toledo from 646 to 657. He has left us thirty-two Latin poems in classic metres, none of which, strictly speaking, are hymns, but his Rex Deus immense has found its way into the collections. In his day he worked hard to improve the singing and other services of the Church. Lastly, there is the Spanish magistrate Cyxilla, who built a church in honor of the martyr Thyrsus of Toledo, and wrote a hymn for the dedication, though some say he got Isidore to do it for him. Daniel (I., 190) gives it in full from the Mozarabic[25] Breviary. But far more important are the anonymous hymns of that Breviary, which constituted the hymnary of the old Spanish Church at the date of the conquest of the country by the Saracens (711-14), and which through the temporary prostration of the Church’s energy was preserved from additions and alterations. The collection therefore is interesting as containing nothing of later date than the eighth century, and probably very little that is later than the seventh. Besides a large number of hymns traceable to other authors, from Hilary to Gregory—most of them from Ambrose and his school—there are forty-eight hymns peculiar to this ancient Breviary. Of these the best known are the Alleluia piis edite laudibus, the Cunctorum rex omnipotens, the Jesu defensor omnium, the O Dei perenne Verbum of Bishop Arturus Serranus of Toledo, the Sacer octavarum dies, the Sacrata Christi tempora, and the Surgentes ad Te, Domine. It is well known that the hymns of Ambrose and his school enjoyed great repute in Spain. These unnamed writers evidently have studied at his feet, their mode of dealing with the great themes of Christian praise having much in common with his. The country, however, which gave Seneca, Lucan, and Quinctilian to Latin literature was under no necessity merely to imitate an Italian model; and we find these Spanish poets departing widely from Ambrose’s school as regards the form of their verse. The four-lined stanza, with four iambic feet (u -) in each line—a line used by the tragedian Seneca before it was adopted by the Christian poets—is the form of verse employed almost exclusively by the Ambrosian school. The Mozarabic writers also use it (Convexa solis orbita), but they also employ as a substitute a trochaic verse of eleven syllables (Lucis auctor clemens, lumen immensum) and more complex choriambic forms (Alleluia piis edite laudibus, etc.). But their hymns, as a whole, lack pith and force; not one of them has earned a place by itself in the affections of Latin Christendom.

The second national group is that of the early Irish writers of Latin hymns. There are not so many of these, and still fewer names have been preserved. But they deserve notice as monuments of that aggressive Church whose missionary labors rendered such grand service in the Christianization of Western Europe. Of Caelius Sedulius there is enough said in the chapter devoted to him and his acrostic hymn. Of Columcille and the Altus Deus prositor we have spoken above. The next name which meets us is that of Ladkenus or Lathacan, an Irishman of the seventh century, to whom is ascribed a hymn of the class called in Irish Luireach (or lorica), meaning a shield. There are two hymns of this class ascribed to Patrick and to Columcille. The former, best known by James Clarence Mangan’s version,

“At Tara to-day, in this awful hour,

I call on the holy Trinity!”

is probably not the work of the Apostle of Ireland; but as it, like that of Columcille, is in Irish, it need not detain us here. The latter begins,

“Alone am I upon the mountain,

O King of heaven, prosper my way,

And then nothing need I fear,

More than if guarded by six thousand.”

That of Lathacan, while possessing the same general character, as aiming at a Christian substitute for the Druidical charms of the pagans, is on a lower level both religiously and poetically. No less than eleven of its twenty-three quatrains are occupied with the enumeration of the parts of the human body, which are placed under divine protection, and these may be not without interest to the students of the history of physiological knowledge.

Many of the early Irish hymns are in the national language, which was at that time the vehicle of a vigorous native poetry. Of those in Latin the most beautiful is the Communion hymn,

“Sancti venite,

Christi corpus sumite,”

which both Daniel and Neale praise for its noble simplicity. An old Irish legend, to which we need not pin our faith, represents Patrick and his nephew Sechnall as hearing the angels sing it first, during the offertory before the communion, and adds, “So from that time to the present that hymn is chanted in Erinn when the body of Christ is received.” Singing at the communion was not unusual in the early Church, and Gregory of Tours has preserved an antiphon used at that sacrament which closely resembles the Irish hymn. But it is now disused.

The hymn is found in the Bangor Antiphonary, an old Irish manuscript of the seventh century, first published by Muratori in his Anecdota (1697-98). From Bangor it had been carried to Bobbio, the famous monastery founded on Italian soil by the Irish missionary Columbanus after he had been driven out of Burgundy by the reigning powers. From Bobbio it made its way to the Ambrosian Library at Milan, where Muratori found it. It is one of the most interesting monuments of the early Irish Church, and its hymns are given or indicated by Daniel in his fourth volume. The first is a series of quintains, each for one of the canonical hours. Then the Hymnum dicat turba fratrum, which already Beda described as hymnus ille pulcherrimus, is found in a mutilated form in the Antiphonary, and ascribed to Hilary. It is a terse rehearsal of the facts of our Lord’s birth, life, passion, and resurrection. Daniel suggests that it is one of the primitive hymns of the martyr-ages of the Church to which Pliny refers, and brought into Latin from the original Greek by some scholarly Briton or Irish man. Then a hymn in commemoration of the Apostles (Precamur Patrem), of which also Daniel thinks that Irish scholarship may have rendered from the Greek. Then a morning hymn based on the Constantinopolitan creed (Spiritus divinae lucis gloriae); and another in honor of the martyrs (Sacratissimi Martyres summi Dei); the Lorica of Lathacan; and two hymns in honor of St. Patrick, one by Sechnall and the other by Fiacc. Daniel gives only the former, which is an abecedary hymn. Both are full of the marvellous—an element not wanting even in the contemporary documents of Patrick’s life, and quite abundant in those of later date.

Besides these there are four other hymns which Mone has shown to be of Irish authorship. The first is the Jesus refulsit omnium, which has been ascribed to Hilary, but is shown not to be his not only by the rhyme, but by the alliteration which marks it as originating in the North of Europe. It is found in manuscripts, German and English, of the eleventh century; but Mone ascribes it to an Irish author both because of the strophe employed and because of the mixture of Greek words with the Latin, the Irish being the best Greek scholars of the West, and being not disinclined to show off their erudition in this way. Another is an abecedary hymn, Ad coeli clara non sum dignus sidera, famous as having been supposed by some stupid critic to be the lost evening hymn which Hilary sent from the East to his daughter along with the Lucis largitor splendide. It probably is as old as the sixth or seventh century, both the structure of the verse and the allusions to pagan beliefs and Christian heresies indicating that antiquity. The use of alliteration and other peculiarities indicate an Irish author, but probably a monk of Bobbio, as the accentuated Sapphic verse was in use in that country. Here are seven of its most characteristic stanzas:

To the clear stars of heaven I am not worthy

The base eyes of my most sad behavior

Even to lift: weighed down with sorrows earthy,

Spare me, O Saviour.

Boon which I ought to show I have neglected,

Evil I did: no limit might resist me;

Crime by no secret conscience was rejected;

O Christ, assist me.

* * * * * * *

Leave me, O Lord, alone with my repenting,

Me from my birth all evil who inherit,

Give me but tears from depths of my consenting

Penitent spirit.

Mine, as I think, are vices so appalling

That the worst torments still will not withhold me,

Save as thy pity on a wretch is calling,

Glad to enfold me.

* * * * * * *

Rescue of earth, the only hope of mortals,

Equal with Father and with Holy Spirit

Three, and yet one beyond those viewless portals

Save by thy merit.

* * * * * * *

Xrist have I ever, in the faith most holy,

Praised with my lips and made a true confession;

Purely I spurned all heresy, nor slowly

Wrought my profession.

HYmns have I sung in Arius’s derision,

Barking Sabellian dog I have not favored,

Simon the swine, whose covetous base vision

Mine never favored.

S. W. D.

Besides this we have the Cantemus omni die concenentes variae, which furnishes a remarkable combination of sustained rhyme with a free use of alliteration; and two hymns in honor of Michael the Archangel, of which the first is an abecedary, and has the same structural peculiarity. Besides these there are other hymns in the Leabhur Jomann, or “Book of Hymns,” in honor of St. Brigid (often confounded with the St. Birgitta of Sweden) and other Irish saints—some in Latin and some in Irish. They have been edited for the Irish Archaeological Society by Dr. J. H. Todd (Dublin, 1855-69).

To the eighth century, the age of the Iconoclasts, of John of Damascus and of Beda, we trace but few anonymous hymns. As we have said, the Urbs beata Hirusalem (with the Angulare fundamentum) may belong here, and so may some in the Mozarabic Breviary. But as only the manuscripts we have named and the “Psalter of the Queen of Sweden”—so called because it once was the property of Queen Christine—go back to this time, we can only guess which of the hymns marked as “very old” in manuscripts of the eleventh and later centuries date back to this. Niebuhr found in a tenth-century manuscript the pilgrim hymn O Roma nobilis, orbis et domina, and published it in the Rheinisches Museum (1829), and traced its accentual form of verse back to the old folk-songs of Rome, such as the Roman soldiers may well have sung at the triumph of Camillus, and certainly did so behind the golden triumphal chariots of Caesar and Aurelian.

To this century some ascribe the hymn for martyrs, Sanctorum meritis inclyta gaudia, which holds its place in a recast in the Roman Breviary, and has occupied the attention of at least four English translators. In the history of theology it is memorable as giving Gottschalk a point by its use of the phrase trina deitas, to which Archbishop Hincmar strongly objected.

Of the less notable hymn-writers of this century three belong to the group of literary men whom Charles the Great gathered at his court or employed in his administration. That Charles himself was a poet in any sense we have no evidence, much less that he wrote the Veni, Creator Spiritus. His biographer, Eginhard, tells us that although he spoke Latin fluently—his native language, of course, being German—he never fully acquired the art of writing, although he kept a tablet under his pillow for the sake of practising. He was a keen lover of learning and a generous patron of education. In one of his trips to Italy he encountered at Parma an Englishman, chief of the Cathedral school at York, and then on his way to Rome to obtain the pallium for Archbishop Eanbald. Charles offered him sufficient inducement to remove to the Continent, and for fourteen years (782-96) Alcuin of York (735-804) was Charles’s minister of education and head of the palace school, in which both the king and his children studied. He was rewarded with various abbacies, and in 796 he retired to one of them—that of St. Martin at Tours—withdrawing from the not very admirable court of his patron to spend his eight last years in study and devotion. He was succeeded by an Irishman named Clemens, who brought over the Irish preference for Greek philosophy, especially that of Plato, to Alcuin’s keen annoyance. In the collections there are some half-dozen hymns ascribed to Alcuin, none of which have made any marked impression. He was an honest, plodding, unimaginative Englishman, such as still writes Latin verses at Eton or Harrow, invitâ Minervâ, and as a matter of duty, not of necessity.

More notable for personal qualities was the Lombard, Paul Warnefried (730-96), better known as Paul the Deacon (Paulus Diaconus), who had witnessed the overthrow of the Lombard kingdom by Charles in 774, and then withdrew to Monte Casino, where he became a Benedictine monk. He attracted Charles’s attention in 781 by a poetical petition in behalf of his brother Arichis, who had been carried beyond the Alps as a prisoner; and the king invited him to his court. He returned to Monte Casino in 787. His most important work, the De Gestis Longobardorum Libri Sex, is marked by a lively and patriotic interest in the legends, habits, and fortunes of his own people. He has preserved for us much early Teutonic lore, such as the poetical explanation of the origin of the name “Lombard,” which Kingsley has worked into a poem in Hypatia. A Frank he never became, and the rough soldiers of Charles’s court proposed to cut off his hands and put out his eyes by way of resenting this. “God forbid,” replied Charles, “that I should thus treat so excellent a poet and a historian.” There are but two hymns which bear Paul Warnefried’s name: one in commemoration of John the Baptist, and the other on the miracles of Benedict of Nursia. The former, which frequently is divided into three parts for different services on St. John’s day, is a hymn of much merit, and still holds its place in the Roman Breviary. Its widest fame is in connection with the history of music, as from its first verse we derive the ordinary names of our musical notes. The verse runs,

Ut queant laxis

Resonare fibris

Mira gestorum

Famuli tuorum,

Solve polluti

Labii reatum,

Sancte Johannes.

The tune composed for the hymn in the Middle Ages, or adapted to it, had the peculiarity that each half verse began on one of the bars of the staff, and each a note higher than the last. This suggested, possibly to Guido of Arezzo in the eleventh century, the possibility of using these first syllables as a mnemonic device to fix the pitch of each note on the memory of those who were learning to sing. Guido, in a letter to his friend Michael, describes the device in terms which suggest that it was his own. But there is no warrant for the assumption often made in this connection that he devised the musical staff. That was in use in England as early as 1016, while Guido wrote about 1067.

A third of Charles’s protégés was Paulinus, whom he made patriarch of Aquileia (726-804), and who is specified by George Cassander as the author of three extant hymns. One of these, the Refulgit omnia luce mundus aurea, is thought by Mone to belong to the sixth or seventh century. It is in the ornate style of his namesake of Nola and his imitator Elpis, so that it may be the work of the older Paulinus. It possesses a philological interest as being written in the lingua rustica, or provincial and countrified Latin, out of which the Romance languages were developed. Paulinus of Aquileia was a German, who took an active part in the controversies of his times, as may be seen from his prose works. Walafrid Strabo in the next century speaks of him as a hymn-writer; but it is impossible to say how many, if any, of the hymns which stand in his name are his work.

The ninth century is much more fertile in hymns than either the seventh or the eighth. It is the age of Charles the Great as Emperor, of Rabanus Maurus and Hincmar, and of John Scotus Erigena; and it witnessed the founding of the school of sequence-singers at St. Gall. To this century has been traced the beautiful paschal sequence Victimae paschali laudes immolent Christiani, one of the few which hold their place in the Roman Missal. Kehrein, on what seems to him good authority, ascribes the sequence to Wipo, the Burgundian chaplain of the Emperor Conrad II., and the tutor of Henry II., who has left us several poems on historical events of his time, besides a prose life of Conrad and two didactic poems for the edification of Henry. He was a man of unusual acquaintance with classical literature, which probably led to his selection as tutor to the young prince. All this makes Kehrein’s ascription of the sequence to him have an air of probability, which, however, is weakened, if not destroyed, by a comparison of this with his undoubted poems. These employ both the classic hexameter and the rhymed verse of his own age; but in neither does he show the fine ear for rhythm which the author of the Victimae paschali laudes must have possessed. The sequence was one of those Easter hymns in which Luther took such delight, and which he describes in general terms in his House-Postill: “In the time of popery many fine hymns were sung! He that broke up hell, and overcame the very Devil therein, therewith the Lord redeemed his Christendom.” Elsewhere in the same book he calls this “a very beautiful hymn,” especially finding delight in the second verse, Mors et Vita duello conflixere mirando: Dux vitae mortuus regnat vivus. “Make it who will, he must have had a high and Christian understanding to have painted this picture with such fine gracefulness.” In his commentary on Hosea, he again quotes it with especial praise.

To this ninth century Koch assigns the Virginis proles opifexque matris, which still holds its place in the Roman Breviary in a revised form. Less offensive to Protestant ears is the brief and beautiful sequence, probably of this century, Quod chorus vatum, which Mr. Blew has translated for his Church Hymn and Tune-Book (1855), and the editor of the Lyra Messianica has copied. Here also belongs the Ad Dominum clamaveram, which is one of the earliest attempts at a metrical treatment of the Psalms. It consists largely of extracts from the fifteen Psalms of Degrees. Here also belongs the Iste confessor Domini, which still holds its place in the Roman Breviary.

Of the less-known hymn-writers we may name the younger Prudentius, who, like his greater namesake, was a Spaniard by birth, his family probably being one of the many which took refuge in France from the rule of the Saracens. Indeed, he assumed the name out of compliment to the elder poet—a practice very reprehensible in the eyes of hymnologists, as increasing the amply sufficient confusion which hangs around the identity of hymn-writers. He was one of the most learned men of his time, and had the manliness to defend the Augustinian doctrine of predestination against Hincmar of Rheims, at the time when Gottschalk had brought it into ill repute by his paradoxical statement of it. But he and Hincmar found common ground in opposing John Scotus Erigena, who asserted that the whole controversy grew out of the ascription of temporal existence to the divine and eternal mind. His hymns are lost to us, those ascribed to him being certainly not of his authorship, unless perhaps the Virgo Dei genetrix.

Servatus Lupus (805-63), abbot of Ferrières, was one of the many pupils of Rabanus Maurus, who rose to eminence in the Church of this age, and were employed by the Karling kings in public affairs. His best monument is his letters, which give us a vivid picture of a time of disorder, and of a man of genuine capacity and honest purpose. His hymns in praise of St. Wigbert are of less worth.

Much more important is Theodulph of Orleans (ob. 821), the author of a single hymn, which has preserved his memory not less by its own merits than by its association with a beautiful but unhistorical legend of its authorship. He, too, was of Spanish birth and Gothic stock. He was honored and trusted by Charles the Great, and was one of the witnesses to his will. He was strongly imperialist in his politics, both before and after Charles’s death opposing the inevitable separation of France from Germany, especially in his poems to Charles and his sons, which are among the best of that age. In 818, however, he was implicated justly or unjustly in the rebellion of Bernard, King of Italy, against his uncle the emperor, and was imprisoned three years. While in prison he composed, tradition says, the hymn for Palm Sunday, Gloria, laus et honor, together with other poems, as the pastime of weary hours. The story runs that it was to the hymn he owed his liberation. On Palm Sunday of 821 the Emperor Lewis the Pious was at Angers, where the Bishop of Orleans was imprisoned in a monastery. Through an open window, when the emperor was within hearing, he sang the hymn, which so moved his heart that he gave orders to set the prisoner at liberty. Another version of the story is that he had taught it to the children of the church, who sang it before the emperor. The legend is discredited by the fact that in 821 there was a general amnesty for political offenders, which must have given him his liberty. He died within the year, by poison it is said.

To make the list complete we add the names of Ermanrich (ob. 840), abbot of Ellwangen in Würtemberg; Drepanius Florus (ob. 860), deacon of the church of Lyons; Eric, a monk at Saint-Germain at Auxerre, and Paul Alvarez of Cordova (ob. 861)—all of whom have left us hymns in commemoration of saints.

In the chapter on Notker a full account has been given of the three principal singers of St. Gall—Notker Balbulus, Tutilo, and Hartmann. There are two lesser sequence-writers of that monastery who belong to the same (ninth) century—Ratpert and Waltram. Ratpert (ob. 900), like Notker, was a pupil of the Irishman Möngal. He was of noble family and born in the neighborhood of Zurich, and made such proficiency that he was entrusted with the oversight of the outer school at St. Gall. His “proses” were composed especially for processional use and for pilgrimages, and therefore are not sequences in the strict sense. To adapt them to this use he fitted them with refrains, which might be caught up by those who had little familiarity with Latin. The Rex sanctorum angelorum is the best known of them. But most important is his position as the first in point of time of the German hymn-writers. He wrote a German hymn in honor of St. Gall (fecit carmen barbaricum populo in laude Sancti Galli canendum), of which unfortunately we have only Ekkehard’s Latin translation, made a century later.

Waltram never rose above the rank of deacon at St. Gall. He was more famous for his poems on secular themes, written to the music of the sequences, than for sequences proper. But one of the latter is ascribed to him.

CHAPTER XXX.
THE UNKNOWN AND THE LESS KNOWN HYMN-WRITERS.
[Tenth to Sixteenth Century.]

The tenth century—the century of the Danes, of the Normans, of the Othos, of the Olafs, of Dunstan, and of Cordova as a centre of philosophic and scientific culture—saw the general establishment of Christianity among the Teutonic peoples of Northern Europe. It was not rich in great Churchmen, great men of letters, or great hymn-writers. We find in it no name great enough to deserve a separate chapter. Yet Odo of Cluny and Fulbert of Chartres, the two Ekkehards, and Rupert of St. Gall are enough to show that it was not altogether barren.

This dark age was a time when the worship of Mary and the saints, already on the increase in previous ages, made rapid advances. The practice of formal canonization of the saints dates from 993. Perhaps the most characteristic hymn of the century is the Ave Maris stella, which has been ascribed to Venantius Fortunatus of the sixth century, but cannot be older than the tenth. Daniel’s final judgment was that a St. Gall MS. proves it to belong here, although he formerly had thought it might be as early as the sixth century. Moll and Mone, however, would put it even later, on the theory that it borrows from one of Hermann of Reichenau’s sequences. It is one of the favorite hymns of the Roman Catholic Church, being found in all the breviaries, and assigned for use not only at the Annunciation, to which it properly belongs, but to others of the many festivals in honor of our Lord’s mother. In the following version Mr. Duffield has given the easy form of the original:

Hail, thou star of ocean,

God’s own mother mortal,

Virgin ever perfect,

Heaven’s own blessed portal.

Bright with such a message,

Gabriel gave thee greeting;

Grant us, then, thy favor,

Eve’s defeat defeating.

Loose the prisoner’s bondage,

Give the blind their vision,

Drive all evils from us,

Pray for our condition.

Show thyself our mother,

Let thy prayer avail us

With thy Son, our Saviour,

Born that naught should fail us.

Virgin pure and only,

Mild among all others,

Make us free from sinning,

Meek beyond our brothers.

To this century or later we must assign the Martyr Dei qui unicum, which (as Invicte Martyr unicum) still holds its place in the Roman Breviary; and the Jesu Redemptor omnium, which is similarly honored.

Odo of Cluny (879-943) is the first of the three poets who have adorned that famous monastic house. He was dedicated before his birth to St. Martin, by his father, a courtier of the Duke of Aquitaine, and became a monk at Tours in fulfilment of this vow. He got such education as the times furnished, going to Paris for the sake of finding the best schools. He then joined the congregation of three monasteries recently founded by Bernon, who was abbot of them all. At the death of Bernon he became the second abbot of Cluny, and it speaks ill for either Bernon or the age that he found his work to be that of a monastic reformer even in a young monastery. He was the most considerable figure in the French Church of his time, and his advice and mediation were sought on all sides. As his name was a very usual one, a long series of books he did not write has been fathered on him, what he really left being a collection of addresses to his monks (Collationes), some sermons, and a few hymns, about four in all. Of these Dr. Neale has translated the Lauda, mater ecclesiae, lauda Christi, and Mr. Chambers the Aeterni Patris unice. They commemorate Mary Magdalene, identifying her, of course, with Mary of Bethany, as Church tradition does.

Fulbert of Chartres (950-1028) was to France, in the second half of this century of disorder and transition, what Odo was in the first. He also was from Aquitaine, and possibly of a noble family, although he seems to contradict his biographers on that point when he says,

“non opibus nec sanguine fretus

Conscendi cathedram, pauper, de sorde levatus.”

He studied at Rheims under the great scholar Gerbert, afterward Pope Sylvester II.—“a pope,” as Dr. Döllinger says, “who was held in great honor as the most learned scholar and the most enlightened spirit of his time,” but afterward was regarded as an expert in the black art, and even as having sold himself to Satan. From him Fulbert at least learned no black arts. Transferred in 968 to Chartres as chancellor of the cathedral, with charge of its school, he made the place a centre of attraction to students from three nations. His scholars called him “the Frankish Socrates,” and frequent is the reference in writers of the next generation to the delightful fellowship they had with this bright-minded and devout master, who taught the science of both natural and divine things, entering into right human relations with each of them, and pointing them to that knowledge which is life eternal. Even after Robert II. elevated him to the bishopric of Chartres, in 1007, he found time to take part in the work of teaching, which he so much loved. He died in 1028.

His letters are his chief monument, and they give us an unattractive picture of his age. One of them denounces bishops who have become soldiers as unworthy of the name. Others tell of the murder, in the very porch of the cathedral, of a priest he had made the sub-dean of the cathedral at Sens. The friends of a rival candidate killed him, with the alleged connivance of the bishop of Sens! In yet another he takes to task Constance, the shrew whom a just Providence awarded to Robert II. as his last wife. His sermons are less notable, and much given to Mariolatry. His hymns are few in number, but one of them, the Chorus novae Hirusalem, is a Whitsunday hymn of much beauty, yet it has not commended itself to the compilers of the Roman Breviary. Mone remarks that it unites classic metre with rhyme, which is true also of his hymn in commemoration of Martin of Tours, Inter patres monachalis.

The fifth abbot of Cluny, Odilo (962-1048), was a dear friend of Fulbert’s, and lamented his death. He continued the work of monastic reform begun by Odo, which made Cluny the centre of monastic energy and life in this age. Especially was the severity of the restored rule of Benedict, as practised at Cluny, opposed to the laxer order established by the Irish monks in Germany. So absorbed was he in this work that he refused to be made Archbishop of Lyons. Fulbert called him “the archangel of the monks.” He also wrote hymns, but there are none that we can attach with certainty to his name.

The same is true of Salvus, abbot of a cloister in the Christian kingdom of Navarre. Heriger, abbot of Lobbes (940-1009), a Flemish Benedictine and hagiologist, of great renown as an educator and a scholar, has left one hymn, Ave per quam, and two antiphons, in honor of the Apostle Thomas. Theodoric of Monte Casino wrote a hymn in honor of St. Maurus.

To the eleventh century we owe the beginnings of many things—rag paper, Gothic architecture, our modern musical notation, the crusades, the troubadours, the peace of God, the Norman rule in England. It is the century of Hildebrand, of Peter Damiani, of Anselm of Canterbury, of the great struggle to establish the celibacy of the clergy and to abolish lay patronage in the Church. It is not rich in hymn-writers, but it has some minor names and anonymous hymns worthy of notice.

To this century belongs the manuscript collection of old English hymns in Latin which the Rev. Joseph Stevenson edited for the Surtees Society in 1851 (Latin Hymns of the Anglo-Saxon Church, with an Interlinear Saxon Gloss. From a manuscript of the Eleventh Century in Durham Library). While many of them are found equally in the breviaries and hymnaries of the Continent, there is a large number which seem to be peculiar to the English Church, and have not been traced to any continental source. None of these are very great hymns, and their importance to us is partly from our interest in the work of our English ancestors, and partly from the preference shown to them by modern English translators. But such work as Annis peractis mensibus and Nuntium nobis fero de supernis is more than respectable. In this manuscript is found the beautiful hymn for Septuagesima and succeeding Sundays, Alleluia, dulce carmen, which therefore may be an old English hymn. It was written in accordance with the old usage that “Alleluia!” should be sung frequently on that and the following Sundays in preparation for Lent. To this century Koch assigns the abecedarian hymn, A patre unigenitus, which gets almost through the alphabet in twenty lines, but is better than this would indicate, or Mr. Chambers would not have translated it. Here belongs the Audi, tellus, audi, which unfortunately is only partly preserved in its original and unexpanded form. It is a judgment hymn, but not one of the greatest. The Lutherans used it for some time after the Reformation, and Dr. Washburn has translated it. The enlarged form recalls the Cur mundus militat of Jacoponus. Du Méril has published a Christmas hymn of this century, Congaudeat turba fidelium, whose first six verses indicate its popular use by their refrain, “In Bethlehem!” It bears a close resemblance to many of the fifteenth century, and may have been their model. To the same editor we owe the terse and spirited Easter hymn of this same century, Mitis agnus, leo fortis, which has found several English translators. To this century or, at latest, to the next, we must assign the very beautiful hymn in commemoration of Stephen the Protomartyr, Sancte Dei pretiose, whose popularity seems to have made it especially tempting to the hymn-tinkers of the Middle Ages. It is found in two other forms, both of them much watered; “but nobody likes inspiration and water,” as Lowell says.

To Anselm of Canterbury, the great archbishop and theologian, seven hymns are assigned in the collections. They are so much below the level of the Cur Deus Homo, the Monologion, and the Prosologion of that great master, as to suggest that they are the work of one of the lesser Anselms—for the name was a common one in that age—and that they have been assigned to him by the eagerness of his editors to swell his works, as has been done with many prose treatises. One of the best is a long “Prayer to the Lord and all His Saints,” beginning Deus, pater credentium, of which Mr. Duffield says, in a manuscript note, that it “contains many excellent stanzas.” There is another, “To Mary and all the Saints,” nearly as long, which shows the author’s training in a French school by its use of the assonance. Yet another on Mary alone—Lux quae luces in tenebris—which has been broken into eight brief hymns for the canonical hours. Christ as the Son and Mary herself are invoked in alternate verses.

Better than any of these is a little hymn which is his in the sense of being based on a fine passage of his prose meditations. This “second Augustine,” like the first, was happier as an occasion of poetry in other men, than in his own verses. Here it is: