The brightness of a holy deathbed blending
With dawning glories of the eternal day.
While Ambrose was defending the faith and inditing sacred songs at Milan, another richly-endowed poet was writing sublime Latin verse far to the West. He was Aurelius Clemens Prudentius, the great Spanish hymnist. Of his personal history we know little except that he was born 348 A.D. in northern Spain, probably at Saragossa.
In early life he occupied important positions of state, but in his latter years he retired to a monastery. Here he exercised his high poetic gifts in writing a series of sacred Latin poems. He was preeminently the poet of the martyrs, never ceasing to extol their Christian faith and fortitude. Bentley called Prudentius the “Horace of the Christians.” Rudelbach declared that his poetry “is like gold set with precious stones,” and Luther expressed the desire that the works of Prudentius should be studied in the schools.
The finest funeral hymn ever written has come to us from the pen of this early Spanish bard. It consists of forty-four verses, and begins with the line, Deus ignee fons animarum. It is sometimes referred to as the “song of the catacombs.” Archbishop Trench of England called this hymn “the crowning glory of the poetry of Prudentius,” and another archbishop, Johan Olof Wallin, the great hymnist of Sweden, made four different attempts at translating it before he produced the hymn now regarded as one of the choicest gems in the “Psalm-book” of his native land.
An English version, derived from the longer poem, begins with the stanza:
Despair not, O heart, in thy sorrow,
But hope from God’s promises borrow;
Beware, in thy sorrow, of sinning,
For death is of life the beginning.