(Florence, 1490).
“Ne la degna stalla del dolce Bambino
Gli Angeli cantano d’ intorno al piccolino;
Cantano e gridano gli Angeli diletti,
Tutti riverenti timidi e subietti,[41]
Al Bambolino principe de gli eletti,
Che nudo giace nel pungente spino.
* * * * *
Il Verbo divino, che è sommo sapiente,
In questo dì par che non sappia niente,
Guardal su’ l fieno, che gambetta piangente,
Como elli non fusse huomo divino.”[15][{13}]
Here, again, are some sweet and homely lines about preparation for the Infant Saviour:—
“Andiamo a lavare
La casa a nettare,
Che non trovi bruttura.
Poi el menaremo,
Et gli daremo
Ben da ber’ e mangiare.
Un cibo espiato,
Et d’ or li sia dato
Senza alcuna dimura.
Lo cor adempito
Dagiamoli fornito
Senza odio ne rancura.”[16][{14}]
[42]There have been few more rapturous poets than Jacopone; men deemed him mad; but, “if he is mad,” says a modern Italian writer, “he is mad as the lark”—“Nessun poeta canta a tutta gola come questo frate minore. S’ è pazzo, è pazzo come l’ allodola.”
To him is attributed that most poignant of Latin hymns, the “Stabat Mater dolorosa”; he wrote also a joyous Christmas pendant to it:—
“Stabat Mater speciosa,
Juxta foenum gaudiosa,
Dum jacebat parvulus.
Cujus animam gaudentem,
Laetabundam ac ferventem,
Pertransivit jubilus.”[17][{15}]
In the fourteenth century we find a blossoming forth of Christmas poetry in another land, Germany.[{16}] There are indeed Christmas and Epiphany passages in a poetical Life of Christ by Otfrid of Weissenburg in the ninth century, and a twelfth-century poem by Spervogel, “Er ist gewaltic unde starc,” opens with a mention of Christmas, but these are of little importance for us. The fourteenth century shows the first real outburst, and that is traceable, in part at least, to the mystical movement in the Rhineland caused by the preaching of the great Dominican, Eckhart of Strasburg, and his followers. It was a movement towards inward piety as distinguished from, though not excluding, external observances, which made its way largely by sermons listened to by great congregations in the towns. Its impulse came not from the monasteries proper, but from the convents of Dominican friars, and it was for Germany in the fourteenth century something like what Franciscanism had been for Italy in the thirteenth. One of the central doctrines of the school [43]was that of the Divine Birth in the soul of the believer; according to Eckhart the soul comes into immediate union with God by “bringing forth the Son” within itself; the historic Christ is the symbol of the divine humanity to which the soul should rise: “when the soul bringeth forth the Son,” he says, “it is happier than Mary.”[{17}] Several Christmas sermons by Eckhart have been preserved; one of them ends with the prayer, “To this Birth may that God, who to-day is new born as man, bring us, that we, poor children of earth, may be born in Him as God; to this may He bring us eternally! Amen.”[{18}] With this profound doctrine of the Divine Birth, it was natural that the German mystics should enter deeply into the festival of Christmas, and one of the earliest of German Christmas carols, “Es komt ein schif geladen,” is the work of Eckhart's disciple, John Tauler (d. 1361). It is perhaps an adaptation of a secular song:—