CHAPTER XXIX.

THE UNKNOWN AND THE LESS KNOWN HYMN-WRITERS. [Fourth to Tenth Century.]

The known is but a fragment broken from the unknown. This is eminently true as regards the authorship of the Latin hymns. When we have dealt as tenderly as the historical conscience will permit with the traditions which assign hymns to this and that author, we still find ourselves unable to affix any name to the great majority. And while it is true that the most part of the very great hymns are not left in this plight of anonymity, it is true that no small number of the best are on the record like Melchizedek—“without father or mother,” and many of them also “without beginning of years,” for we can determine only approximately the century of their origin. Nor is this at all surprising. Fame was neither the object nor the expectation of the writers of the Latin hymns of the early and Middle Ages. Their utmost expectation, probably, was to be valued a little by their brethren in their own and their sister monasteries as the author of a fine sequence or an appropriate hymn for a yearly festival. It was enough for that purpose that the report of their authorship passed from mouth to mouth in the choir, without any record made of it. The love of glory as a literary motive, came in, as Mr. Symonds reminds us, with the Renaissance, which borrowed it from the old pagans. Many a devout singer of the centuries before that practised the wisdom of à Kempis’s saying, _Ama nesciri_, “Love to be unknown.” They wrote not for gain in renown, but for use in the edification of their brethren and of the Church. And to live for use rather than gain is to live Christianly, for, as Swedenborg says, “The kingdom of heaven is a kingdom of uses.”

This and the next chapter we shall give partly to some of these orphaned hymns, touching only on the greatest. And as we come down the centuries we shall speak also of the less notable hymn-writers, some of them not less notable as men or as Churchmen, but such as have made less of a mark in hymnology.

At the outset we are met by two of the greatest of the sacred songs of the Church, which are none the less hymns although classed technically as canticles. Who wrote the _Gloria in Excelsis_ and the _Te Deum laudamus_? As everybody knows, the opening words of the former are the song of the angels who brought the good news to the shepherds—words which authenticate their heavenly origin by their simplicity, beauty, and force—“a master-song,” as Luther says, “which neither grew nor was made on earth, but came down from heaven.” But the much longer supplement, which evidently reflects the situation of the Church in the days of the Arian controversy, must either have originated in the fourth century and in the East, or must have been altered to adapt it to that time. The original still exists in Greek, but in three forms, which differ somewhat; and the Latin version is defective in that it follows a later form than that which is given in the so-called _Apostolical Constitutions_; and, of course, the English follows the Latin, except in the part taken from the Gospel, where “good will to men” takes the place of “to men of good will” (_hominibus bonae voluntatis_), the latter being the reading adopted by the English translators of 1611, but rejected by the revisers of 1883.[22]

Who made the Latin version? An untrustworthy tradition ascribes it to Telesphorus, who was Bishop of Rome in 128-38. It is possible that he prescribed the chanting of the Scripture words in the Church service; but the whole hymn is of later date in Latin. There is much more likelihood that it was, according to a tradition recorded by Alcuin in the ninth century, the work of Hilary of Poitiers, the first Latin hymn-writer.

The _Te Deum laudamus_ has some claims to be regarded as the greatest of Christian hymns. Like the _Gloria in Excelsis_ it belongs to that first period of Christian hymn-writing, when the Hebrew psalms still furnished the models for Christian poets, and the same free movement of rhythmical prose was all that was required or even tolerated. There is no mention of it in Church literature before the sixth century, when the monastic rules of both Caesarius of Arles (_c._ 527) and of Benedict of Nursia (_c._ 530) prescribe its use, and the Council of Toledo mentions it. As it uses the words of the Vulgate in verses 22-25 and 27 to the end, it cannot, as it now stands, be much more than a century older than this, as the date of the Vulgate is 382-404. Yet a tradition recorded by Abbot Abbo of Fleury in the ninth century, ascribes this hymn also to Hilary of Poitiers, who died fifteen years before Jerome put his hand to the work of revising the Latin Bible. Daniel thinks to reconcile the discrepancy by ascribing it to Hilary of Arles, who was born the year before Jerome had finished his work, and by regarding it as a translation from the Greek, as verses 22-26 certainly are. They are found in the Appendix to the Alexandrian manuscript of the Greek New Testament, where they follow the _Gloria in Excelsis_ with the interruption only of an Amen. But is it not possible to regard the last eight verses as a separate hymn, made up, with the exception of the strong verse—

26. Dignare, Domine, die isto sine peccato nos custodire—

of verses from the Scriptures? These last verses have no internal connection with the first twenty-two, and they differ decidedly in style, form, and source. Those contain no Scripture quotations, except the _Ter-Sanctus_ in verses 5 and 6, which is not taken from the Vulgate version,[23] but apparently from the Itala. If, therefore, we consider those twenty-two verses as a hymn by themselves, this may have been the work of Hilary of Poitiers, and there is no necessity for assuming that it was not an original Latin hymn. This becomes more probable if we drop out verse 13, which interrupts the flow of the Christological thought, and evidently was interpolated to make the hymn complete from a Trinitarian point of view. When the _Gloria in Excelsis_ and the _Te Deum_ were composed, it was the relation of the Son to the Father which occupied the mind of the Church. Both hymns are the expression of “the present truth” on that subject; the mention of the Holy Spirit in both is probably by interpolation at a later date.

As the form, and in some places the meaning of the _Te Deum_ is misrepresented in the current version, it may be worth while to reproduce the original in a more literal version:

1. Thee as God we praise, Thee as Lord we own,

2. Thee as eternal Father all the earth doth worship,

3. Thee all the angels— To thee heaven and all its powers,

4. To thee cherubim and seraphim with unceasing voice cry aloud,

5. Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Sabaoth,

6. The heavens and the earth are full of the majesty of thy glory!

7. Thee the glorious choir of the apostles,

8. Thee the praiseworthy company of the prophets,

9. Thee the white-robed army of the martyrs praiseth.

10. Thee, through the circle of the lands, the Holy Church confesseth

11. Father of unbounded majesty;

12. Thy adorable, true and only Son.

13 (14). Thou King of glory, O Christ,

14 (15). Thou of the Father art the Son eternal.

15 (16). Thou, to deliver us, tookest manhood, Thou didst not dread the Virgin’s womb.

16 (17). Thou, since thou hast overcome the sting of death, Hast opened to believers the kingdom of heaven.

17 (18). Thou, at the right hand of God, sittest in the glory of the Father;

18 (19). As our judge thou art believed to be coming.

19 (20) Thee therefore we beg, Assist thy servants whom thou hast redeemed with precious blood.

20 (21). Cause us to be gifted, among thy saints, with eternal glory.

Amen.

There are no other unfathered hymns known to be of this century, and few less notable hymn-writers. To Jerome is ascribed a hymn, _Te Bethlehem celebrat_, which is not in any of the collections. His great contemporary, Augustine of Hippo, has had more than one fine hymn assigned to him, probably because his works have furnished the suggestion for so many. Notably Peter Damiani and Hildebert of Tours drew upon him. But the great theologian was not a poet, as we can see from his one essay in that form, viz., his “psalm” against the Donatists, in which he gives a popular and metrical exposition of the parable of the net (Matt. 13:47-50). It is quite enough to prove that he did not write the _Ad perennis vitae fontem_ (Damiani), or the _Quid, tyranne, quid minaris_ (Damiani), or the _O gens beata coelitum_, or even the _Domine Jesu, noverim me_, all of which have been given to him at times.

To the fifth century—the century of Prudentius and Ennodius—we may ascribe the earlier in the large group of hymns classed as Ambrosian, which are the work of a series of writers who may be described as constituting a school. It is one of the hardest problems in Latin hymnology to distinguish between Ambrose’s own work and that of his imitators, and to arrange the hymns composed by the latter between the fifth and the eighth century in any chronological order. What can be said positively has been shown in Chapter V. The chief authorities on the subject are the early collectors, Clichtove, Cassander, and Thomasius. Of considerable importance is the MS. given by Francis Junius in the seventeenth century to the University of Oxford, and published in 1830 by Jacob Grimm. It contains a collection of twenty-six hymns by Ambrose and the Ambrosians, with a translation into old High German, probably made at St. Gall in the ninth century. But these do not exhaust the list. Others have been pointed out by Mone and other collectors, as proving their kinship to the school by their metrical form or their contents and style. Schletterer enumerates ninety hymns of the school, and of these he assigns fifteen to Ambrose himself.

Closely related to the group, and yet not assigned to it, are several hymns to which a very early date is assigned by Mone at least. To this fifth century he gives the _Unam duorum gloriam_, which he also claims as of German origin, and describes as one of the oldest hymns of the German Church. It is in commemoration of two martyrs, to whose honor a church near Münster was dedicated, and is strictly classic in metre. Here also he assigns the _Christi caterva clamitat_, an Advent hymn of classic metre and primitive tone. He probably would agree with Wackernagel in selecting the same century for the hymn on Stephen, the protomartyr, _Primatis aulae coelicae_, in which he finds reminders of the style of Prudentius. Lastly, he assigns this date to the Paschal hymn, _Te lucis auctor personat_, which became obsolete when its special reference to Easter as the time of the baptism of adult catechumens lost its significance. It was used in France and probably other countries.

To the same fifth century belongs Paulinus, Bishop of Nola (353-431), who has many better claims to remembrance than his hymns. He was one of those men of whom their contemporaries cannot speak without enthusiasm, and as Augustine, Jerome, and Ambrose are among his eulogists we may assume that the praise was not undeserved. He came of a noble Gallic stock; he inherited wealth and acquired from the teaching of the poet Ausonius all the culture of his time; he filled high office in Italy and Spain; he spent the last twenty-two years of his life in administering with a faithful laboriousness the affairs of a Campanian bishopric. He did not receive baptism until his thirty-fifth year, so that he may have been brought up a pagan, although the inference is not necessary. In 378 he was made Roman consul to fill an unexpired term (_consul suffectus_), and was sent into Campania at the end of the year. There he was so deeply impressed by a festival in honor of the martyr Vincent of Nola, that his affections were drawn strongly to the city. But soon after he married a Spanish wife and went to live first at Bordeaux and then at Barcelona. At the former in 389 he was received into the membership of the Church; at the latter he and his wife, after the death of their infant son, resolved to renounce the “secular” life and to give themselves to asceticism and charity. He was ordained to the priesthood in response to a general demand of the people during the Christmas festivities. He removed to Nola, where he and his wife lived in the service of the poor, in an age when the incursions of Goths and Vandals were producing frightful wretchedness. He seems to have held right views of the responsibility of property, and instead of divesting himself of it at once, he kept it to use for his brethren. Nor did he separate from his wife after the fashion of Ennodius and others of the age. They labored together to the end. About 409 he was elected Bishop of Nola, and occupied that see until his death. Among his gifts to his people was a new aqueduct to supply their town with pure water, an evidence of his breadth of mind and genuine humanity. When he died he was added to the list of the recognized saints, and few with better right.

His literary achievement was not great, although everything he has written has its interest. His epistles and poems are reflections of both his excellence and his faults. They show at once the good heart of the man and his proneness to superstition. But his contemporaries thought his poems wonderful, and even some of the moderns have re-echoed this estimate. Erasmus calls him “the Christian Cicero,” a title more frequently assigned to Lactantius. Caspar Barth, in his _Adversaria_ (1624), declines to rank any other Christian poet above him. His poems exhibit the decadence of Latin verse, in that quantity is often neglected and accent used to replace it. Only a few of them are hymns in any sense, and these are narrative or reflective rather than lyric. Bjorn gives two of them in his collection.

This fifth century also brings us the first woman among the Christian singers. Elpis, identified by a somewhat doubtful tradition with Helpes, the first wife of the pagan philosopher Boethius, has left a florid hymn in honor of the Apostles Peter and Paul, which holds its place in modified form in the Roman Breviary, and is divided into two hymns. She employs accentuated verse, while the verses in Boethius’s classic work, _De Consolatione Philosophiae_, conform to the quantitative prosody of classic poetry. Another hymn on the same Apostles, _Felix per omnes festum mundi cardines_, is ascribed to her and also to Paulinus of Nola. The Breviary hymn, _Miris modis repente liber_, is a recast of part of it.

There are several poems and chronicles which are ascribed to Prosper Tyro, whom some identify with Prosper of Aquitaine (403-65), the Gallic champion of strict Augustinian orthodoxy against the semi-Pelagian party in that province—John Cassian, Vincent of Lerins, etc. This is the more likely, as Prosper loved to “drop into poetry” even in his controversial treatises. George Cassander includes a hymn from Prosper Tyro’s works in his collection.

Many of the finest of Ambrosian hymns, which have taken rank among the favorites of Western Christendom, as sharing the noble spirit and the torrent-like power of utterance of the great Bishop of Milan, are credited by the hymnologists to the sixth century—the age of Benedict of Nursia, Caesarius of Arles, Belisarius, and Gregory the Great. We give Mr. Duffield’s translation of two of the finest, regretting that he did not live to translate others which he had marked with that view in his Index:

CHRISTE QUI LUX ET DIES.

Christ who art the light and day, Drive the shades of night away, Thou, who art the Light of light, Make our pathway glad and bright.

Now we pray thee, holy Lord, Keep us safely by thy word; Night and day at peace in thee May our spirits rested be.

Let no evil dream appear, Let no enemy draw near, Let us bow to thee alone, Thou who pitiest thine own!

While in sleep we close our eyes, May our hearts forever rise Unto thee, whose mighty hand Keeps thine own in every land.

Look upon us, our Defence! Drive all lurking traitors hence, Rule thy children, O most Good, Who are purchased with thy blood.

Be thou mindful of our state, In this body profligate; Guard our minds, and ever be Near us, Lord, as we to thee.

TELLURIS INGENS CONDITOR.

Thou mighty Maker of earth’s frame, Who gavest land and sea their name, Hast swept the waters to their bound, And fixed for aye the solid ground.

That soon upspringing should be seen The herb with blossoms gold and green, And fruit which ripely hangeth there, And grass to which the herds repair.

Relieve the sorrows of the soul! Our wounded spirits make thou whole, That tears may sinful deeds allay, And cleanse all baser lusts away.

Let us be swayed by thy decree, From many evils set us free; With goodness fill the waiting heart, And keep all fear of death apart!

To the same sixth century belong some notable hymns which have not even a school to which to assign their paternity. The most famous of these is the

_Ad coenam Agni providi_,

which has been twice rewritten in conformity with the laws of classic prosody, reappearing in the Roman Breviary as the _Ad regias Agni dapes_, and in the Paris Breviary as the _Forti tegente brachio_. In English there have been at least twelve versions since 1710. The great merit of the hymn is the vigorous and terse way in which the mystical correspondence of the Christian sacrament to the Jewish passover, and of our deliverance from the yoke of Satan to the Jewish deliverance from the Egyptian bondage, are worked out. As Daniel suggests, its first stanza refers to the old usage that the catechumens, who had received baptism just before Easter, partook of the other sacrament on the first Sunday after Easter (_Dominicus in albis_), wearing the white robes of their baptism (_stolis albis candidi_). Another notable but fatherless hymn of this age is the _Sanctorum meritis inclyta gaudiis_—a beautiful commemoration of the martyrs whose sufferings were still so vividly remembered by the Church. Quite worthy of mention also is the Lenten hymn, _Jam Christe, sol justitiae_, which expresses the early Christian attitude toward God’s works, connecting the looked-for Easter with the renewal of the world by the spring—

“Dies venit, dies tua In qua reflorent omnia.”

The hymn for All Saints Day, _Psallat plebis sexus omnis voce corde carmina_, is notable not only for its own vigor, but as being one of the oldest in which the alliterative principle of the early Celtic and Teutonic verse is employed in Latin. It therefore comes from the North of Europe, with the chances in favor of Ireland.

Of known but less important hymn-writers of the sixth century we have only two, Columba and Flavius. The former is the great Irish missionary known to his countrymen as Columcille (the Dove, or the Dove of the Church), who lived A.D. 521 to 597. He was one of the O’Donnells of Donegal, whose chiefs, something more than seventy years before his birth, had offered especial opposition to Patrick’s preaching. He studied in the great school founded at Clonard, on the upper waters of the Boyne, by Finnian, the first of those teachers who made the Ireland of this and the following centuries “the land of schools,” to which students flocked from Great Britain and even the Continent. Finnian sent him to Clonfad to obtain ordination as a bishop; but the bishop, who was ploughing in the field when he came, made a mistake and gave him ordination as a priest. And he never rose higher than this in hierarchical dignity. Not that it mattered much in the very elastic system of Church government Patrick had established in Ireland. The tribal or sept system was copied in the Church arrangement. At the head of each church sept stood a _coarb_, who might be a woman, and frequently was a priest or deacon. Under this jurisdiction the bishops took the same relative place that the bards held to the chiefs in the civil tribes. Sometimes there would be a dozen of these right reverend fathers in God in one small Irish town, all under the direction of a female _coarb_, miscalled an abbess by later authors, as the Church sept has been miscalled a monastery.

As a penance for having been the cause of a faction fight or civil war—one hardly knows which to call it—over the ownership of a psalter, Columba banished himself from Ireland and took up his abode at Iona (or Hy), from which centre he preached the Gospel to the Scots (_i.e._, Irish) and Picts (_i.e._, Welsh) of the Highlands and the Western Islands. The former had conquered this region in the fifth century and were yet to give their name to the whole country, although up to A.D. 1198 there is no instance of Scotus meaning Scotchman rather than Irishman. But while Christianity had penetrated even the wilds of Donegal in Ireland, these Irish of Scotland and their Cymric subjects still were pagans. So as Patrick was Scotland’s gift to Ireland, Columcille was Ireland’s to Scotland. He was the type of those persuasive and successful missionaries which the Church of Patrick sent through Great Britain and to the Continent. He used the power of song very freely in his missionary labors, confounding the Druids and attracting the people by the grave, sweet melody of the Church’s chants. Like Whitefield and Summerfield, he had a wonderful, because pure voice and could sing so as to be heard a mile away. He, too, was a poet of no mean merit. The sorrows of his voluntary exile from the land of his birth—the land which exercises such a weird fascination over her children that all other lands are to her what prose is to poetry or water to wine—seem to have wakened in him the gift of song. Less beautiful than these patriotic elegies is the abecedarian hymn on the spiritual history of our world, _Altus prositor, vetustus dierum, et ingenitus_, which is given in the Appendix to the _Lyra Sacra Hibernica_ (Belfast, 1879) and in the second part of Dr. J. H. Todd’s _Liber Hymnorum_. It is written in a very rude Latinity, and is intended for instruction and edification rather than lyric expression. But it is an interesting monument of the faith of the great missionary, as it brings us nearer him than does the wonderful biography by Abbot Adamnan, his seventh successor at Iona. It was first printed in 1657 by the Irish scholar Colgan, and with it two other and shorter hymns (_In Te, Christe, credentium_ and _Noli, Pater, indulgere_), which also may be Columcille’s.

Flavius was Bishop of Chalons in the year 580, and has left one hymn, _Tellus et aeth’ra jubilent_, which Daniel calls an excellent poem (_carmen eximium_). Its theme is our Lord’s washing the feet of the Apostles, and for this reason it was commonly sung after meals in some monasteries.

Of the seventh century, the century of Heraclius and Mahomet, there is not one great hymn-writer known as such, but there are some great hymns. The greatest is the _Urbs beata Hirusalem, dicta pacis visio_, of which the _Angulare fundamentum_ is a part, and which is of the seventh or eighth century. Daniel, however, with the support of Schlosser, regards this hymn as not certainly older than the tenth century, and has Neale’s support in asserting that the last two verses are a later addition to give it suitableness for singing at a dedication of a church.[24] The earliest mention of its use in the tenth century is in the church of Poitiers at the annual blessing of the font on Easter Sunday, which tends to confirm the supposition that two verses have been added. He thinks it of Spanish origin, as the metrical form is one usual in the Mozarabic Breviary. In later days it underwent three revisions. In the old Paris Breviary of 1527 it becomes the _Urbs Jerusalem beata_; in the new Breviary of 1736 it becomes the _Urbs beata, vera pacis visio_ under the hands of Abbé Besnault (_ob._ 1726). In the Roman Breviary of 1631 it is the _Coelestis Urbs Jerusalem_, the form, as usual, best known to modern readers and translators, but not the best worth knowing. Along with the _Urbs beata_ we may place the _Gloriosa Jerusalem_, probably of Spanish origin, and of the same century as well as similar in contents, but unequal in beauty and poetic worth.

Next in worth is the abecedarian judgment hymn, _Apparabet repentina dies magna Domini_, which Neale speaks of as containing the germ of the _Dies Irae_. It is little more than a rehearsal in a trochaic metre of our Lord’s prediction of the Day of Judgment. It follows the Scripture text much more closely than does Thomas of Celano. Bede mentions it in the next century. Mrs. Charles has translated it.

To this seventh century or the next Mone refers the _Salvator mundi, Domine_, which is most probably an Anglo-Saxon hymn, although of the Ambrosian school. It reappears in the Anglican _Orarium_ of 1560 and the _Preces Privatae_ of 1564, and is said to have been familiar to Sir Thomas Browne and Bishop Ken through its use at Wykeham’s school in Winchester. It, along with the _Te lucis ante terminum_, also sung at Winchester, may have suggested both Bishop Ken’s “Glory to thee, my God, this night,” and Browne’s “The night is come, like to the day,” given in his _Religio Medici_. To the seventh century we also may refer the _Quicunque vultesse salvus_, a hymn better known as the Athanasian Creed.

Besides these there are two groups of hymns whose temporal limits do not lie within the seventh century on either side, but which may be as well discussed here as anywhere. The first are the early Spanish hymn-writers. We know by name three of the seventh century. The first is Isidore, Archbishop of Seville (570-636), the scholar of encyclopaedic range, who did so much to adapt the learning of the Romans to the wants of the Gothic community in Spain. To him are ascribed, somewhat doubtfully, three ballad-hymns in honor of as many martyrs and two abecedarian poems on repentance. More certainly authentic are three or four ascribed to his contemporary Eugenius, who was Archbishop of Toledo from 646 to 657. He has left us thirty-two Latin poems in classic metres, none of which, strictly speaking, are hymns, but his _Rex Deus immense_ has found its way into the collections. In his day he worked hard to improve the singing and other services of the Church. Lastly, there is the Spanish magistrate Cyxilla, who built a church in honor of the martyr Thyrsus of Toledo, and wrote a hymn for the dedication, though some say he got Isidore to do it for him. Daniel (I., 190) gives it in full from the Mozarabic[25] Breviary. But far more important are the anonymous hymns of that Breviary, which constituted the hymnary of the old Spanish Church at the date of the conquest of the country by the Saracens (711-14), and which through the temporary prostration of the Church’s energy was preserved from additions and alterations. The collection therefore is interesting as containing nothing of later date than the eighth century, and probably very little that is later than the seventh. Besides a large number of hymns traceable to other authors, from Hilary to Gregory—most of them from Ambrose and his school—there are forty-eight hymns peculiar to this ancient Breviary. Of these the best known are the _Alleluia piis edite laudibus_, the _Cunctorum rex omnipotens_, the _Jesu defensor omnium_, the _O Dei perenne Verbum_ of Bishop Arturus Serranus of Toledo, the _Sacer octavarum dies_, the _Sacrata Christi tempora_, and the _Surgentes ad Te, Domine_. It is well known that the hymns of Ambrose and his school enjoyed great repute in Spain. These unnamed writers evidently have studied at his feet, their mode of dealing with the great themes of Christian praise having much in common with his. The country, however, which gave Seneca, Lucan, and Quinctilian to Latin literature was under no necessity merely to imitate an Italian model; and we find these Spanish poets departing widely from Ambrose’s school as regards the form of their verse. The four-lined stanza, with four iambic feet (u -) in each line—a line used by the tragedian Seneca before it was adopted by the Christian poets—is the form of verse employed almost exclusively by the Ambrosian school. The Mozarabic writers also use it (_Convexa solis orbita_), but they also employ as a substitute a trochaic verse of eleven syllables (_Lucis auctor clemens, lumen immensum_) and more complex choriambic forms (_Alleluia piis edite laudibus_, etc.). But their hymns, as a whole, lack pith and force; not one of them has earned a place by itself in the affections of Latin Christendom.

The second national group is that of the early Irish writers of Latin hymns. There are not so many of these, and still fewer names have been preserved. But they deserve notice as monuments of that aggressive Church whose missionary labors rendered such grand service in the Christianization of Western Europe. Of Caelius Sedulius there is enough said in the chapter devoted to him and his acrostic hymn. Of Columcille and the _Altus Deus prositor_ we have spoken above. The next name which meets us is that of Ladkenus or Lathacan, an Irishman of the seventh century, to whom is ascribed a hymn of the class called in Irish _Luireach_ (or _lorica_), meaning a shield. There are two hymns of this class ascribed to Patrick and to Columcille. The former, best known by James Clarence Mangan’s version,

“At Tara to-day, in this awful hour, I call on the holy Trinity!”

is probably not the work of the Apostle of Ireland; but as it, like that of Columcille, is in Irish, it need not detain us here. The latter begins,

“Alone am I upon the mountain, O King of heaven, prosper my way, And then nothing need I fear, More than if guarded by six thousand.”

That of Lathacan, while possessing the same general character, as aiming at a Christian substitute for the Druidical charms of the pagans, is on a lower level both religiously and poetically. No less than eleven of its twenty-three quatrains are occupied with the enumeration of the parts of the human body, which are placed under divine protection, and these may be not without interest to the students of the history of physiological knowledge.

Many of the early Irish hymns are in the national language, which was at that time the vehicle of a vigorous native poetry. Of those in Latin the most beautiful is the Communion hymn,

“Sancti venite, Christi corpus sumite,”

which both Daniel and Neale praise for its noble simplicity. An old Irish legend, to which we need not pin our faith, represents Patrick and his nephew Sechnall as hearing the angels sing it first, during the offertory before the communion, and adds, “So from that time to the present that hymn is chanted in Erinn when the body of Christ is received.” Singing at the communion was not unusual in the early Church, and Gregory of Tours has preserved an antiphon used at that sacrament which closely resembles the Irish hymn. But it is now disused.

The hymn is found in the Bangor Antiphonary, an old Irish manuscript of the seventh century, first published by Muratori in his _Anecdota_ (1697-98). From Bangor it had been carried to Bobbio, the famous monastery founded on Italian soil by the Irish missionary Columbanus after he had been driven out of Burgundy by the reigning powers. From Bobbio it made its way to the Ambrosian Library at Milan, where Muratori found it. It is one of the most interesting monuments of the early Irish Church, and its hymns are given or indicated by Daniel in his fourth volume. The first is a series of quintains, each for one of the canonical hours. Then the _Hymnum dicat turba fratrum_, which already Beda described as _hymnus ille pulcherrimus_, is found in a mutilated form in the Antiphonary, and ascribed to Hilary. It is a terse rehearsal of the facts of our Lord’s birth, life, passion, and resurrection. Daniel suggests that it is one of the primitive hymns of the martyr-ages of the Church to which Pliny refers, and brought into Latin from the original Greek by some scholarly Briton or Irish man. Then a hymn in commemoration of the Apostles (_Precamur Patrem_), of which also Daniel thinks that Irish scholarship may have rendered from the Greek. Then a morning hymn based on the Constantinopolitan creed (_Spiritus divinae lucis gloriae_); and another in honor of the martyrs (_Sacratissimi Martyres summi Dei_); the _Lorica_ of Lathacan; and two hymns in honor of St. Patrick, one by Sechnall and the other by Fiacc. Daniel gives only the former, which is an abecedary hymn. Both are full of the marvellous—an element not wanting even in the contemporary documents of Patrick’s life, and quite abundant in those of later date.

Besides these there are four other hymns which Mone has shown to be of Irish authorship. The first is the _Jesus refulsit omnium_, which has been ascribed to Hilary, but is shown not to be his not only by the rhyme, but by the alliteration which marks it as originating in the North of Europe. It is found in manuscripts, German and English, of the eleventh century; but Mone ascribes it to an Irish author both because of the strophe employed and because of the mixture of Greek words with the Latin, the Irish being the best Greek scholars of the West, and being not disinclined to show off their erudition in this way. Another is an abecedary hymn, _Ad coeli clara non sum dignus sidera_, famous as having been supposed by some stupid critic to be the lost evening hymn which Hilary sent from the East to his daughter along with the _Lucis largitor splendide_. It probably is as old as the sixth or seventh century, both the structure of the verse and the allusions to pagan beliefs and Christian heresies indicating that antiquity. The use of alliteration and other peculiarities indicate an Irish author, but probably a monk of Bobbio, as the accentuated Sapphic verse was in use in that country. Here are seven of its most characteristic stanzas:

To the clear stars of heaven I am not worthy The base eyes of my most sad behavior Even to lift: weighed down with sorrows earthy, Spare me, O Saviour.

Boon which I ought to show I have neglected, Evil I did: no limit might resist me; Crime by no secret conscience was rejected; O Christ, assist me.

* * * * * * *

Leave me, O Lord, alone with my repenting, Me from my birth all evil who inherit, Give me but tears from depths of my consenting Penitent spirit.

Mine, as I think, are vices so appalling That the worst torments still will not withhold me, Save as thy pity on a wretch is calling, Glad to enfold me.

* * * * * * *

Rescue of earth, the only hope of mortals, Equal with Father and with Holy Spirit Three, and yet one beyond those viewless portals Save by thy merit.

* * * * * * *

Xrist have I ever, in the faith most holy, Praised with my lips and made a true confession; Purely I spurned all heresy, nor slowly Wrought my profession.

HYmns have I sung in Arius’s derision, Barking Sabellian dog I have not favored, Simon the swine, whose covetous base vision Mine never favored.

S. W. D.

Besides this we have the _Cantemus omni die concenentes variae_, which furnishes a remarkable combination of sustained rhyme with a free use of alliteration; and two hymns in honor of Michael the Archangel, of which the first is an abecedary, and has the same structural peculiarity. Besides these there are other hymns in the _Leabhur Jomann_, or “Book of Hymns,” in honor of St. Brigid (often confounded with the St. Birgitta of Sweden) and other Irish saints—some in Latin and some in Irish. They have been edited for the Irish Archaeological Society by Dr. J. H. Todd (Dublin, 1855-69).

To the eighth century, the age of the Iconoclasts, of John of Damascus and of Beda, we trace but few anonymous hymns. As we have said, the _Urbs beata Hirusalem_ (with the _Angulare fundamentum_) may belong here, and so may some in the Mozarabic Breviary. But as only the manuscripts we have named and the “Psalter of the Queen of Sweden”—so called because it once was the property of Queen Christine—go back to this time, we can only guess which of the hymns marked as “very old” in manuscripts of the eleventh and later centuries date back to this. Niebuhr found in a tenth-century manuscript the pilgrim hymn _O Roma nobilis, orbis et domina_, and published it in the _Rheinisches Museum_ (1829), and traced its accentual form of verse back to the old folk-songs of Rome, such as the Roman soldiers may well have sung at the triumph of Camillus, and certainly did so behind the golden triumphal chariots of Caesar and Aurelian.

To this century some ascribe the hymn for martyrs, _Sanctorum meritis inclyta gaudia_, which holds its place in a recast in the Roman Breviary, and has occupied the attention of at least four English translators. In the history of theology it is memorable as giving Gottschalk a point by its use of the phrase _trina deitas_, to which Archbishop Hincmar strongly objected.

Of the less notable hymn-writers of this century three belong to the group of literary men whom Charles the Great gathered at his court or employed in his administration. That Charles himself was a poet in any sense we have no evidence, much less that he wrote the _Veni, Creator Spiritus_. His biographer, Eginhard, tells us that although he spoke Latin fluently—his native language, of course, being German—he never fully acquired the art of writing, although he kept a tablet under his pillow for the sake of practising. He was a keen lover of learning and a generous patron of education. In one of his trips to Italy he encountered at Parma an Englishman, chief of the Cathedral school at York, and then on his way to Rome to obtain the _pallium_ for Archbishop Eanbald. Charles offered him sufficient inducement to remove to the Continent, and for fourteen years (782-96) Alcuin of York (735-804) was Charles’s minister of education and head of the palace school, in which both the king and his children studied. He was rewarded with various abbacies, and in 796 he retired to one of them—that of St. Martin at Tours—withdrawing from the not very admirable court of his patron to spend his eight last years in study and devotion. He was succeeded by an Irishman named Clemens, who brought over the Irish preference for Greek philosophy, especially that of Plato, to Alcuin’s keen annoyance. In the collections there are some half-dozen hymns ascribed to Alcuin, none of which have made any marked impression. He was an honest, plodding, unimaginative Englishman, such as still writes Latin verses at Eton or Harrow, _invitâ Minervâ_, and as a matter of duty, not of necessity.

More notable for personal qualities was the Lombard, Paul Warnefried (730-96), better known as Paul the Deacon (_Paulus Diaconus_), who had witnessed the overthrow of the Lombard kingdom by Charles in 774, and then withdrew to Monte Casino, where he became a Benedictine monk. He attracted Charles’s attention in 781 by a poetical petition in behalf of his brother Arichis, who had been carried beyond the Alps as a prisoner; and the king invited him to his court. He returned to Monte Casino in 787. His most important work, the _De Gestis Longobardorum Libri Sex_, is marked by a lively and patriotic interest in the legends, habits, and fortunes of his own people. He has preserved for us much early Teutonic lore, such as the poetical explanation of the origin of the name “Lombard,” which Kingsley has worked into a poem in _Hypatia_. A Frank he never became, and the rough soldiers of Charles’s court proposed to cut off his hands and put out his eyes by way of resenting this. “God forbid,” replied Charles, “that I should thus treat so excellent a poet and a historian.” There are but two hymns which bear Paul Warnefried’s name: one in commemoration of John the Baptist, and the other on the miracles of Benedict of Nursia. The former, which frequently is divided into three parts for different services on St. John’s day, is a hymn of much merit, and still holds its place in the Roman Breviary. Its widest fame is in connection with the history of music, as from its first verse we derive the ordinary names of our musical notes. The verse runs,

_Ut_ queant laxis _Re_sonare fibris _Mi_ra gestorum _Fa_muli tuorum, _Sol_ve polluti _La_bii reatum, Sancte Johannes.

The tune composed for the hymn in the Middle Ages, or adapted to it, had the peculiarity that each half verse began on one of the bars of the staff, and each a note higher than the last. This suggested, possibly to Guido of Arezzo in the eleventh century, the possibility of using these first syllables as a mnemonic device to fix the pitch of each note on the memory of those who were learning to sing. Guido, in a letter to his friend Michael, describes the device in terms which suggest that it was his own. But there is no warrant for the assumption often made in this connection that he devised the musical staff. That was in use in England as early as 1016, while Guido wrote about 1067.

A third of Charles’s _protégés_ was Paulinus, whom he made patriarch of Aquileia (726-804), and who is specified by George Cassander as the author of three extant hymns. One of these, the _Refulgit omnia luce mundus aurea_, is thought by Mone to belong to the sixth or seventh century. It is in the ornate style of his namesake of Nola and his imitator Elpis, so that it may be the work of the older Paulinus. It possesses a philological interest as being written in the _lingua rustica_, or provincial and countrified Latin, out of which the Romance languages were developed. Paulinus of Aquileia was a German, who took an active part in the controversies of his times, as may be seen from his prose works. Walafrid Strabo in the next century speaks of him as a hymn-writer; but it is impossible to say how many, if any, of the hymns which stand in his name are his work.

The ninth century is much more fertile in hymns than either the seventh or the eighth. It is the age of Charles the Great as Emperor, of Rabanus Maurus and Hincmar, and of John Scotus Erigena; and it witnessed the founding of the school of sequence-singers at St. Gall. To this century has been traced the beautiful paschal sequence _Victimae paschali laudes immolent Christiani_, one of the few which hold their place in the Roman Missal. Kehrein, on what seems to him good authority, ascribes the sequence to Wipo, the Burgundian chaplain of the Emperor Conrad II., and the tutor of Henry II., who has left us several poems on historical events of his time, besides a prose life of Conrad and two didactic poems for the edification of Henry. He was a man of unusual acquaintance with classical literature, which probably led to his selection as tutor to the young prince. All this makes Kehrein’s ascription of the sequence to him have an air of probability, which, however, is weakened, if not destroyed, by a comparison of this with his undoubted poems. These employ both the classic hexameter and the rhymed verse of his own age; but in neither does he show the fine ear for rhythm which the author of the _Victimae paschali laudes_ must have possessed. The sequence was one of those Easter hymns in which Luther took such delight, and which he describes in general terms in his _House-Postill_: “In the time of popery many fine hymns were sung! He that broke up hell, and overcame the very Devil therein, therewith the Lord redeemed his Christendom.” Elsewhere in the same book he calls this “a very beautiful hymn,” especially finding delight in the second verse, _Mors et Vita duello conflixere mirando: Dux vitae mortuus regnat vivus_. “Make it who will, he must have had a high and Christian understanding to have painted this picture with such fine gracefulness.” In his commentary on Hosea, he again quotes it with especial praise.

To this ninth century Koch assigns the _Virginis proles opifexque matris_, which still holds its place in the Roman Breviary in a revised form. Less offensive to Protestant ears is the brief and beautiful sequence, probably of this century, _Quod chorus vatum_, which Mr. Blew has translated for his _Church Hymn and Tune-Book_ (1855), and the editor of the _Lyra Messianica_ has copied. Here also belongs the _Ad Dominum clamaveram_, which is one of the earliest attempts at a metrical treatment of the Psalms. It consists largely of extracts from the fifteen Psalms of Degrees. Here also belongs the _Iste confessor Domini_, which still holds its place in the Roman Breviary.

Of the less-known hymn-writers we may name the younger Prudentius, who, like his greater namesake, was a Spaniard by birth, his family probably being one of the many which took refuge in France from the rule of the Saracens. Indeed, he assumed the name out of compliment to the elder poet—a practice very reprehensible in the eyes of hymnologists, as increasing the amply sufficient confusion which hangs around the identity of hymn-writers. He was one of the most learned men of his time, and had the manliness to defend the Augustinian doctrine of predestination against Hincmar of Rheims, at the time when Gottschalk had brought it into ill repute by his paradoxical statement of it. But he and Hincmar found common ground in opposing John Scotus Erigena, who asserted that the whole controversy grew out of the ascription of temporal existence to the divine and eternal mind. His hymns are lost to us, those ascribed to him being certainly not of his authorship, unless perhaps the _Virgo Dei genetrix_.

Servatus Lupus (805-63), abbot of Ferrières, was one of the many pupils of Rabanus Maurus, who rose to eminence in the Church of this age, and were employed by the Karling kings in public affairs. His best monument is his letters, which give us a vivid picture of a time of disorder, and of a man of genuine capacity and honest purpose. His hymns in praise of St. Wigbert are of less worth.

Much more important is Theodulph of Orleans (_ob._ 821), the author of a single hymn, which has preserved his memory not less by its own merits than by its association with a beautiful but unhistorical legend of its authorship. He, too, was of Spanish birth and Gothic stock. He was honored and trusted by Charles the Great, and was one of the witnesses to his will. He was strongly imperialist in his politics, both before and after Charles’s death opposing the inevitable separation of France from Germany, especially in his poems to Charles and his sons, which are among the best of that age. In 818, however, he was implicated justly or unjustly in the rebellion of Bernard, King of Italy, against his uncle the emperor, and was imprisoned three years. While in prison he composed, tradition says, the hymn for Palm Sunday, _Gloria, laus et honor_, together with other poems, as the pastime of weary hours. The story runs that it was to the hymn he owed his liberation. On Palm Sunday of 821 the Emperor Lewis the Pious was at Angers, where the Bishop of Orleans was imprisoned in a monastery. Through an open window, when the emperor was within hearing, he sang the hymn, which so moved his heart that he gave orders to set the prisoner at liberty. Another version of the story is that he had taught it to the children of the church, who sang it before the emperor. The legend is discredited by the fact that in 821 there was a general amnesty for political offenders, which must have given him his liberty. He died within the year, by poison it is said.

To make the list complete we add the names of Ermanrich (_ob._ 840), abbot of Ellwangen in Würtemberg; Drepanius Florus (_ob._ 860), deacon of the church of Lyons; Eric, a monk at Saint-Germain at Auxerre, and Paul Alvarez of Cordova (_ob._ 861)—all of whom have left us hymns in commemoration of saints.

In the chapter on Notker a full account has been given of the three principal singers of St. Gall—Notker Balbulus, Tutilo, and Hartmann. There are two lesser sequence-writers of that monastery who belong to the same (ninth) century—Ratpert and Waltram. Ratpert (_ob._ 900), like Notker, was a pupil of the Irishman Möngal. He was of noble family and born in the neighborhood of Zurich, and made such proficiency that he was entrusted with the oversight of the outer school at St. Gall. His “proses” were composed especially for processional use and for pilgrimages, and therefore are not sequences in the strict sense. To adapt them to this use he fitted them with refrains, which might be caught up by those who had little familiarity with Latin. The _Rex sanctorum angelorum_ is the best known of them. But most important is his position as the first in point of time of the German hymn-writers. He wrote a German hymn in honor of St. Gall (_fecit carmen barbaricum populo in laude Sancti Galli canendum_), of which unfortunately we have only Ekkehard’s Latin translation, made a century later.

Waltram never rose above the rank of deacon at St. Gall. He was more famous for his poems on secular themes, written to the music of the sequences, than for sequences proper. But one of the latter is ascribed to him.