Per te serpens est subversus,
which saved a great deal of trouble.
A hymn to the crown of thorns, Sacrae Christi celebremus, is quite in the manner of Adam of St. Victor; the same marvellous ingenuity of allusion to remote Scripture facts, and the same technical mastery of flowing verse. The Novum sidus exoritur is the oldest Transfiguration hymn—that being now a Church festival—and by no means the worst.
The sequence on the Three Holy Kings (or Magi), who brought offerings to the infant Saviour, which begins Majestati sacrosanctae, is referred by some critics to the next century. But as it occurs in the list of sequences which Joachim Brander, a monk of St. Gall, drew up in 1507 for Abbot Franz von Gaisberg of that monastery, it probably belongs to the fifteenth century. Brander enumerates three hundred and seventy-eight sequences, specifying their subjects and authors, the latter not always successfully, and closes with that which Franz von Gaisberg composed in honor of Notker Balbulus. His list will be found in Daniel’s fifth volume. Of this, in commemoration of the three kings, whose relics are supposed to rest in the cathedral at Koeln (Cologne), he says that it is beautiful and one of the best. Mr. Duffield has left a translation of part:
“A threefold gift three kings have brought
To Christ, God-man, who once was wrought
In flesh and spirit equally;
A God triune by gifts adored—
Three gifts which mark one perfect Lord,
Whose essence is triunity.