Like us in mortal flesh is he,
Unlike us in his purity.
That so he might restore us men
Like to himself and God again.
Wherefore, on this his natal day,
Glad, to our Lord, we homage pay.
We praise the Holy Trinity,
And render thanks, O God, to thee!
What Ruskin remarks of the disposition of the art of the time to dwell on the darker side of things—to insist on the seeming preponderance of darkness over light, death over life—is seen also in its hymns. The Advent hymn, Veni, veni, rex gloriae, is as gloomy a lucubration as ever was associated with a Church festival. The Homo tristis esto, which is a study of the Lord’s passion apart from His resurrection, is hardly more gloomy. But other poets have more joyful strains. In the Haec est dies triumphalis we have an Easter hymn, and an Ascension hymn in the Coelos ascendit hodie, which are fittingly joyful; and in the Spiritus sancte gratia an invocation of the Comforter more prosaic than its great predecessors, but with its own place in the presentation of that great theme. A rather fine Trinity hymn is the O Pater, sancte, mitis atque pie, written in a sort of sapphic verse with iambic feet before the caesura, and trochaic following it, the feet in each case being determined by accent, not quantity. Mr. Chambers and Mr. Hewett both have translated it.
Of the innumerable hymns and sequences to the saints, we notice that our Lord’s grandmother comes in for an increasing share. Mone in his third volume gives twenty-five, of which sixteen belong to this century and eight to the fourteenth. It is significant that one of them, O stella maris fulgida, is a hymn to Mary, which was altered to the new devotion to her mother. She is hailed in others as the “refuge of sinners” (peccantibus refugium), and declared immaculate (Anna labe carens), and exalted in a way which suggests that the other members of the genealogical line which connects our Lord with Adam have been neglected most unfairly. Why stop with His grandmother and exclude His grandfather? It was in the next century that the cult of Joseph came to the front. Of the Marian hymns of this time the Virginis in gremio is about the best, and the Ave hierarchia comes next. The Ave Martha gloriosa, in commemoration of Martha of Bethany, is a fine hymn in itself, and interesting as one of a group of hymns composed in Southern France in honor of this particular saint. A Church myth brings her to Provence to kill the monster (τερας) from which Tarascon takes its name, and the Church at Arles still bears a sculptured representation of the victory. Her real function in Provence was to take the place of the Martis or Brito-Martis, who was the chief loyal deity, and from whom Marseilles probably took its name. She was either of Cretan or Phoenician origin, and corresponded to the Greek Artemis, her name meaning Blessed Maiden. So her myth was transferred to the over-busy woman of Judea