Perhaps the most successful attempt to write hexameters containing rhymes or assonances is the twelfth-century poem of Bernard Morlanensis, a monk of Cluny, beginning with the famous lines:
“Hora novissima, tempora pessima sunt, vigilemus.
Ecce minaciter imminet arbiter ille supremus.”
Bernardi Morlanensis, De contemptu mundi, ed. by Thos. Wright, Master of the Rolls Series, vol. 59 (ii.), 1872. Bernard says in his Preface, as to his measures: “Id genus metri, tum dactylum continuum exceptis finalibus, tum etiam sonoritatem leonicam servans....”
[308] “Carmina Mutinensia,” Poet. Lat. aev. Car. iii. 703. The poem has forty-two lines, of which the above are the first four. The usual date assigned is 924, but Traube in Poet. aev. Car. has put it back to 892.
[309] See further text and discussion in Traube, “O Roma nobilis,” Abhand. Bairish. Akad. Philos., philol. Klasse, 1891.
[310] The verbal Sequence or prosa was thus a species of trope. Tropes were interpolations or additions to the older text of the Liturgy. The Sequences were the tropes appended to the last Alleluia of the Gradual, the psalm chanted in the celebration of the Mass, between the reading of the Epistle and the Gospel. Cf. Leon Gautier, Poésie liturgique au moyen âge, chap. iii. (Paris, 1886); ibid. Œuvres poétiques d’Adam de Saint-Victor, p. 281 sqq. (3rd ed., Paris, 1894).
[311] On the Sequence see Leon Gautier, Poésie liturgique au moyen âge (Paris, 1886), passim, and especially the comprehensive summary in the notes from p. 154 to p. 159. Also see Schubiger, Die Sängerschule St. Gallus (1858), in which many of Notker’s Sequences are given with the music; also v. Winterfeld, “Die Dichterschule St. Gallus und Reichenau,” Neue Jahrbücher f. d. klassisch. Altertum, Bd. v. (1900), p. 341 sqq.
The present writer has found Wilhelm Meyer’s Fragmenta Burana (Berlin, 1901) most suggestive; and in all matters pertaining to mediaeval Latin verse-forms, use has been made of the same writer’s exhaustive study: “Ludus de Antichristo und über lat. Rythmen,” Sitzungsber. Bairisch. Akad. Philos., philol. Klasse, 1882. See also Ch. Thurot, “Notices, etc., de divers MSS. latins pour servir à l’histoire des doctrines grammaticales au moyen âge,” in vol. xxii. (2) of Notices et extraits des MSS. pp. 417-457.
[312] “May our trumpet be guided mightily by God’s right hand, and may He hear our prayers with gentle and tranquil ear: for our praise will be accepted if what we sing with the voice a pure conscience sings likewise. And that we may be able, let us all beseech divine aid to be always present with us.... O good King, kind, just, and pitying, who art the way and the door, unlock the gates of the kingdom for us, we beg, and pardon our offences, that we may praise thy name now and through all the ages.”
[313] G. M. Dreves, “Die Prosen der Abtei St. Martial zu Limoges,” p. 59 (vol. vii. of Dreves’s Analecta hymnica medii aevi; Leipzig, 1889). “Let every band sing with fount renewed and the Spirit’s grace with joyful praise and clear mind. Now is made good the tenth part (i.e. the fallen angels), undone by fault; and thus that celestial casting out is made good in divine praise. Lo! the bright day of the Lord gleams through the broad spaces of the world: in which all the redeemed people exult because everlasting death is destroyed.”