To this century belongs the manuscript collection of old English hymns in Latin which the Rev. Joseph Stevenson edited for the Surtees Society in 1851 (Latin Hymns of the Anglo-Saxon Church, with an Interlinear Saxon Gloss. From a manuscript of the Eleventh Century in Durham Library). While many of them are found equally in the breviaries and hymnaries of the Continent, there is a large number which seem to be peculiar to the English Church, and have not been traced to any continental source. None of these are very great hymns, and their importance to us is partly from our interest in the work of our English ancestors, and partly from the preference shown to them by modern English translators. But such work as Annis peractis mensibus and Nuntium nobis fero de supernis is more than respectable. In this manuscript is found the beautiful hymn for Septuagesima and succeeding Sundays, Alleluia, dulce carmen, which therefore may be an old English hymn. It was written in accordance with the old usage that “Alleluia!” should be sung frequently on that and the following Sundays in preparation for Lent. To this century Koch assigns the abecedarian hymn, A patre unigenitus, which gets almost through the alphabet in twenty lines, but is better than this would indicate, or Mr. Chambers would not have translated it. Here belongs the Audi, tellus, audi, which unfortunately is only partly preserved in its original and unexpanded form. It is a judgment hymn, but not one of the greatest. The Lutherans used it for some time after the Reformation, and Dr. Washburn has translated it. The enlarged form recalls the Cur mundus militat of Jacoponus. Du Méril has published a Christmas hymn of this century, Congaudeat turba fidelium, whose first six verses indicate its popular use by their refrain, “In Bethlehem!” It bears a close resemblance to many of the fifteenth century, and may have been their model. To the same editor we owe the terse and spirited Easter hymn of this same century, Mitis agnus, leo fortis, which has found several English translators. To this century or, at latest, to the next, we must assign the very beautiful hymn in commemoration of Stephen the Protomartyr, Sancte Dei pretiose, whose popularity seems to have made it especially tempting to the hymn-tinkers of the Middle Ages. It is found in two other forms, both of them much watered; “but nobody likes inspiration and water,” as Lowell says.
To Anselm of Canterbury, the great archbishop and theologian, seven hymns are assigned in the collections. They are so much below the level of the Cur Deus Homo, the Monologion, and the Prosologion of that great master, as to suggest that they are the work of one of the lesser Anselms—for the name was a common one in that age—and that they have been assigned to him by the eagerness of his editors to swell his works, as has been done with many prose treatises. One of the best is a long “Prayer to the Lord and all His Saints,” beginning Deus, pater credentium, of which Mr. Duffield says, in a manuscript note, that it “contains many excellent stanzas.” There is another, “To Mary and all the Saints,” nearly as long, which shows the author’s training in a French school by its use of the assonance. Yet another on Mary alone—Lux quae luces in tenebris—which has been broken into eight brief hymns for the canonical hours. Christ as the Son and Mary herself are invoked in alternate verses.
Better than any of these is a little hymn which is his in the sense of being based on a fine passage of his prose meditations. This “second Augustine,” like the first, was happier as an occasion of poetry in other men, than in his own verses. Here it is:
TO THE HOLY SPIRIT.
Veni jam veni
Benignissime,
Dolentis animiae
Consolator,
Promptissimus
In opportunatibus