"Appensa est vitis inter tua brachia, de qua
Dulcia sanguineo vina rubore fluunt." [Footnote 232]
[Footnote 231: Trench's Sacred Latin Poetry, p. 152.]
[Footnote 232: For the whole see Trench's Sacred Latin Poetry, p.130.]
But his most celebrated hymn is the one written on the occasion of the sending the true cross by the emperor to Radegunda, at the consecration of a church at Poictiers. It is called Vexilla Regis prodeunt:
I.
"The royal banners forward go,
The cross shines forth with mystic glow,
Where he in flesh, our flesh who made,
Our sentence bore, our ransom paid.
VI.
"With fragrance dropping from each bough,
Sweeter than sweetest nectar thou:
Decked with the fruit of peace and praise,
And glorious with triumphant lays.
VIl.
"Hall, altar! hail, O Victim! Thee
Decks now thy passion's victory,
Where life for sinners death endured,
And life by death for man procured." [Footnote 233]
[Footnote 233: Dr. Neale's Mediaeval Hymns.]
Bede the Venerable wrote hymns also; the two best known are the Hymnum canamus gloriae, and Hymnum canentes martyrum.
We now advance to the last and richest of all the periods of hymnology, the mediaeval. The list is headed with the royal name of Robert II. of France, who wrote, hymns, one of which is a Veni Sancte Spiritus. Peter Damian, the cardinal bishop of Ostia, who died in 1072, wrote many hymns, but the two greatest are De Die Mortis and Ad perennis vitae fontem. [Footnote 234] Adam of St. Victor was another prolific hymn-writer; thirty-six of his productions are extant, and well known. [Footnote 235]
[Footnote 234: Trench's Sacred Latin Poetry, pp. 278, 315. ]
[Footnote 235: Ibid., pp. 53. 111, 160, 202, 212, 227.]
Peter the Venerable and Thomas à Kempis have also left hymns behind them. But it was reserved for Archbishop Trench to dig out of the mouldering relics of the past a hymn written by a monk of Clugny, one Bernard de Morlaix, the translation of which, by Dr. Neale, has supplied the church of every denomination with favorite hymns; The most general name by which it is known is Jerusalem the Golden. The original is a poem of about three thousand lines, called De Contemptu Mundi, a melancholy satire upon the corruptions of the times. The first appearance of it in print, is in a collection of poems, De Corrupto Ecclesiae Statu, by Flacius Illyricus. We cannot speak too highly of this poem of Bernard, nor of the merits of Dr. Neale's translation. The original is written in one of the most difficult of all metres, technically called "leonini cristati trilices daetylici," a dactylic hexameter, divided into three parts, with a tailed rhyme and rhymes between the two first clauses. Dr. Neale gives a specimen of this verse in English: