O sanctissima, O purissima,
Dulcis Virgo Maria!
Mater amata, intemerata,
Ora pro nobis!
O most holy, O most spotless,
Mary, Virgin glorious!
Mother dearest, maiden clearest—
Oh, we pray thee, pray for us.
The sweetest of English poets could not resist echoing this kind of evening music in a strain of his own; but though he did it in the course of an invocation, it is rather a description than a prayer. It is, however, very Sicilian:—
INVOCATION.
Sung behind the scenes in Coleridge’s tragedy of “Remorse;”
to be accompanied, says the poet, by “soft music
from an instrument of glass or steel.”
Hear, sweet spirit—hear the spell!
Lest a blacker charm compel;
So shall the midnight breezes swell
With thy deep long-lingering knell;
(Observe the various yet bell-like intonation of that last verse, and the analogous feeling in the repetition of the rhyme.)
And at evening evermore,
In a chapel on the shore,
Shall the chanters, sad and saintly,
Yellow tapers burning faintly,
Doleful masses chant for thee,
Miserere, Domine!
Hark! the cadence dies away
On the yellow moonlight sea:
The boatmen rest their oars, and say,
Miserere, Domine!
The tapers are yellow in the chapel, and the moonlight yellow out of doors—one of those sympathies of colour which are often finer than contrast.
Coleridge was so fond of sweet sounds, that he makes one of the characters in this play exclaim,—
If the bad spirit retain’d his angel’s voice,
Hell scarce were hell.