Nothing yet can equal love.
Pain itself is quite too gentle,
One poor death too brief must be,
I would suffer thousand tortures—
Every woe is light to me!
CHAPTER XVII.
HILDEBERT AND HIS HYMN.
Those who love the “Golden Legend” of Longfellow will remember how effectively he has there used the Latin songs and hymns. Friar Paul is so very like the famous Friar John of Rabelais, that he is probably copied from that worthy. Indeed his Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum, with its dog-Latin and its broad satire on the habits of the monks, was a most effective weapon in the hands of the reformers. There were a great many learned men who were by no means equally as pious, and who found their bodily contentment in the cloister. Against these and all like them came the constant shafts of ridicule or reproach.
But now, when this same Friar Paul “tunes his mellow pipe” to a bacchanalian solo in the refectory, we can almost forgive him, forasmuch as he sings in such capital measure. There is a Gaudiolum—a regular merry-making of monks—down in the cellar; in which, by the way, Lucifer, disguised in the gray habit, takes his appropriate place. And when Friar Paul begins on the praise of good liquor, he parodies the metre and rhyme of the current religious sequences. Listen to him:
“Felix venter quem intrabis,
Felix guttur quod rigabis,