§133. HYMNS AND SACRED POETRY. 865
contains nearly three thousand lines, and was dedicated to Peter the Venerable. At the side of its glowing descriptions of heaven, which are repetitions, it contains a satire on the follies of the age and the greed of the Roman court.1 It is written in dactylic hexameters, with leonine and tailed rhyme, and is difficult of translation.
The most prolific of the mediaeval Latin poets is Adam of St. Victor, d. about 1180. He was one of the men who made the convent of St. Victor famous. He wrote in the departments of exegesis and psychology, but it is as a poet he has enduring fame. Gautier, Neale, and Trench have agreed in pronouncing him the " foremost among the sacred Latin poets of the Middle Ages"; but none of his hymns are equal to Bernard's hymns,2 the Stdbat mater, or Dies tree. Many of Adam's poems are addressed to Mary and the saints, including Thomas a Becket. A deep vein of piety runs through them all.3
Hymns of a high order and full of devotion we owe to the two eminent theologians, Bonaventura and Thomas Aquinas. Of Bonaventura's sacred poems the one which has gone into many collections of hymns begins, —
fiecordare sanctw crucis qui perfectam viam duds. Jesus, holy Cross, and dying.
Three of Thomas Aquinas' hymns have found a place in the Roman Breviary. For six hundred years two of these have formed a part of the ritual of Corpus Christi ; namely, —
1 For this reason Flacius Illyricus printed the poem entire in his collection of poems on the corruption of the Church, — Varia doctorum piorumque virorum de corrupto eccles: statu poemata, Basel, 1557. I have a copy of this rare volume.
2 Deutsch, art. Adam de S. Victor, Herzog, I. 164, Migne, vol. 196, gives 36 of Adam's poems. Gautier, in 1858, found 106 in the Louvre library, whither they had been removed at the destruction of St. Victor during the Revolution. He regards 45 as genuine.
8 Wrangham has given translations of all of Adam's hymns. March gives eight poems in the original. Some of these have gone into English Hymnals. See Julian, p. 15.
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866 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1049-1294.
Fange, lingua, gloriosi corporis mysterium, Sing, my tongue, the mystery telling,
and
Lauda, Zion, salvatorem. Zion, to thy Saviour singing.1
In both of these fine poems, the doctrine of transubstantiation finds full expression.
No other two hymns of ancient or mediaeval times have re ceived so much attention as the Dies irce and the Stabat mater. They were the product of the extraordinary reli gious fervor which marked the Franciscan order in its ear lier period, and have never been excelled, the one by its solemn grandeur, and the other by its tender and moving pathos.
Thomas of Celano, the author of Dies irce? was born about 1200, at Celano, near Naples, and became one of the earliest companions of Francis d'Assisi. In 1221 he accompanied Ciesar of Spires to Germany, and a few years later was made guardian, custos, of the Franciscan convents of Worms, Spires, Mainz, and Cologne. Returning to Assisi, he wrote, by commission of Gregory IX., his first Life of St. Francis, and later, by command of the general of his order, he wrote the second Life.
The Dies irce opens with the lines, —
Dies zrce, dies ilia solvet sceclum in favilla, teste David cum sibylla.
In the most familiar of the versions, Sir Walter Scott freely reproduced the first lines thus : —
That day of wrath, that dreadful day, When heaven and earth shall pass away, What power shall be the sinner's stay ? How shall he meet that dreadful day ?
1 Julian, pp. 662 sqq., 878 sqq. Also Christ in Song, Engl. ed., pp.467 sqq. Daniel gives five of Thomas' hymns, I. 251-256, II. 97.
2 The first mention of his authorship is in the liber conformitatum, about 1380. The oldest MS. is a Dominican missal in the Bodleian of the same date.