Our hearts be pure from evil, Now let the heavens be joyful; Let earth her song begin; Their notes let all things blend; St. John of Damascus. Or again, this of St. Andrew of Crete : 'Christian! dost thou see them Christian! dost thou hear them, Always watch and prayer?" "While I breathe I pray :" Night shall end in day.'-&c. The following holds a middle place in its tone, but is an excellent example of the antithetical style of many ancient hymns. The translation is cast in the prose form of the original, and is from Dr. Neale's 'Commentary on the Psalms :' They cry to Him for strength-and from Him that was wounded to the death, and weak with mortal weakness on the cross, they obtain might. They cry to Him for wisdom,-and from Him that condescended to the ignorance of childhood they receive counsel that cannot fail. We when the people are allowed to sit. What first-fruits shall I bear O Thou! the Merciful and Gracious One, Yea! passed him, in my fall; And lust made bare of all Of Thee, O God! and that Celestial band, A spiritual temptress smiled, Unbridled passion grasped the unhallowed short If we might venture, upon a very acquaintance, to name the characteristics of these canons, we should say richness and repose, and a continuous thread of Holy Scripture, especially types, woven into them. But we must again move westward, for with St. Joseph of the Studium (830), the most prolific of all, the Watts of Greece,' as he has been called, the full tide of hymnological power was going down in the East, while in the Latin Church it was fast rising to its future magnificence. 4. While Cosmas and his brethren were chanting with ease in the language from which the Church had from the first accepted her vocabulary, the first fathers of Latin hymnography, St. Ambrose, St. Hilary, Prudentius, and St. Gregory, had been struggling with the difficulty of composing in a language upon which these Greek words bad to be grafted de novo. To make such words available in verse, they had to burst through the barriers of the old classic Latin prosody, and find some metre in which such indispensable Christian words as 'Ecclesia,' and many Latin words hitherto confined to prose, might be used to the glory of God; but it This is a 'Kathisma' (sitting), or interca- was not till the days of Venantius Fortunatus lated piece, such as occurs in long canons, | (580), our own venerable Bede, and other They cry unto Him for riches,-and from Him that had not where to lay His head, that was born in the poor inn-manger, and buried in a given grave, they receive the pearl of great price. They cry to Him for joy,-and from the man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief, they receive the pleasures that are on His right hand for evermore.' still greater masters of the eighth and ninth centuries, that the new wine of Christianity, having burst the old bottles,' says Dean Trench, was gathered into nobler chalices, vessels more fit to contain it,' than the artificial measures of quantity and feet. After the invention of what may be called Church metres (ruled by accent) and the introduction of rhymes, the flood of sacred Latin poetry mounted steadily to its height, lifting up with it, for the admiration of all ages, the names of St. Peter Damian, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, and his uncanonised namesake Bernard the monk of Clugny, Hildebert Archbishop of Tours, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Adam of St. Victor, and the works of many more, whose names are lost to us; for it is'a curious fact that, whereas in the East the names of the authors have been almost universally preserved with their hymns in the Service-books, the Western hymns whose authors are known are the exception. The wonderful sequence attributed to Thomas of Celano, Dies iræ, dies illa,' 'the most sublime-we give the epithets accorded by Dr. Neale the 'Stabat Mater Dolorosa' (attributed to Jacopone), the most pathetic,' and that most lovely' poem of the Clugniac monk, so marvellously sustained through three thousand lines of rhymed dactylic hexameters, e. g. 'Hic breve vivitur, hic breve plangitur, hic breve fletur, Non breve vivere, non breve plangere, retribuetur,' are all so well known through the translations respectively of Dr. Irons, Mr. Caswall, and Mr. Neale, that we need only mark down, for those who are not Latiners,' the first lines of each to remind them of these old-established favourites : And 'Day of wrath, O day of mourning.' 'Brief life is here our portion.' To thee, O dear country.' 'Jerusalem the golden.' All the last three being from different portions of the monk's poem. Thou of Comforters the best! Solace in the midst of woe! O most Blessed Light Divine! All our good is turned to ill. Heal our wounds; our strength renew; Wash the stains of gilt away: On the faithful, who adore In Thy sevenfold gifts descend; Give them joys that never end. Amen.' Of hymns and sequences together the Latin Churches have an immense store. Not only have the Roman Breviary, Missal, &c., their full complement of them, but the numerous peculiaruses' of different dioceses in France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and England, afford a large additional number-some of very great beauty. It is not so much our object to introduce the reader to the poetry of these hymns, as to suggest an inquiry into their fitness for our English services. For this purpose the plain, simple Christian songs of unpolished versifiers, deeply imbued with religious feeling, serve often far better than really beautiful poetry; and it has been truly said by John Newton that there is that in hymns which comes more readily from the verse-writer than the poet. It is necessary to bear this in mind in judging of the few hymns that follow. The chief value of the Latin hymns, as a source whence we may supply our need, consists in the narrative hymns, a class in which we are singularly deficient. 'We cannot estimate fully the effect of the narrative hymns in keeping up a knowledge of the The hymn of King Robert the Pious, of facts of Christianity among the people through France, which seems to be considered by the middle ages.' Happy would it be for Dean Trench to contest the palm of loveli-England if this 'knowledge of the facts' was ness with the last, is less known, and deserves full notice : Come, Thou Holy Spirit! come; not still sadly lacking among her poor, and among others too who have not the plea of poverty to excuse their ignorance. But it is so, in spite of national schools and Government grants; and good men have in consequence hailed with delight the translation and * Christian Life in Song.' adoption of the narrative hymns of old, hoping to combine with the grateful praising of God for His dealings with man a more intimate knowledge and appreciation of those dealings in the worshippers. The following verses from the 'Pange Lingua Gloriosi' of Venantius Fortunatus, as they appear in some of our modern hymn-books, are a good specimen of a narrative hymn, the original being placed in the first class' by Dr. Neale: 'Sing, my tongue, the Saviour's glory; Tell His triumph far and wide; Of His body crucified; Eating of the tree forbidden Man had fallen by Satan's snare, Did this second tree prepare, Of the time foretold drew nigh, Left his Father's throne on high, Clothed in our mortality. Thus did Christ to perfect manhood Of the cross, for us is slain. Blessing, honour everlasting, To the immortal Deity; To the Father, Son, and Spirit Glory through the earth and heaven To the blessed Trinity. Amen.' The next, from the Paris Breviary, is a beautiful Christmas hymn, narrating the scene at Bethlehem : -- 'Jam desinant suspiria.' 'God from on high hath heard: Let sighs and sorrow cease; Lo! from the opening heaven descends Hark, through the silent night Their joyful songs proclaim that "God See how the shepherd-band Speed on with eager feet! Come to the hollowed cave with them The holy Babe to greet. Let us give one more example; not a narrative, but a meditative hymn, from the commencement of the long poem of St. Bernard, 'Jesu, dulcis memoria,' of which Dean Trench observes that it is, of all his poems, the most eminently characteristic of its author;' it is found as a hymn in the Sarum Breviary, 'On the Feast of the Name of Jesus: 'Jesu! the very thought of Thee With sweetness fills the breast; No voice can sing, no heart can frame, A sweeter sound than Jesu's Name, O Hope of every contrite heart! To those who fall how kind Thou art? But what to those who find? Ah! this The love of Jesus, what it is, None but His loved ones know,' &c. &c. The Latin hymns are, then, of that very character which is so rare in our English collections; they include a greater variety of subjects and modes of handling them than those of other nations; perhaps because their growth extended over a longer period-more than a thousand years-and over a larger area; and because, as is probable, they were the work of a greater number of writers; to them, too, belong the hymns which adorned the Old English Service-books, and in which our forefathers for many generations found a channel for their praises; and hence, probably, in them we find a greater harmony in tone and language with our present prayers, which owe their origin to the same books. Further, if our Church may be said to have pointed out any source from which her children should look for hymns, it is this; for the only hymn in metre which bears her authority is the Veni Creator' in the Ordination Service. But our course now brings us to the decline of Latin sacred poetry, and we must be passing on to other peoples and lan guages. One of the accompanying marks of corruption in the Court and Church of Rome and its dependencies was a return in art and literature-hymns not excepted-to the slavish bondage of a revived paganism.* Not only did hymn-writers of the sixteenth century strive to write classical hymns, in imitation of Horace and his contemporaries, but the Roman authorities, with Leo X. at their head, set to work to reform, or rather,' says one writer, to deform,' the old hymns upon the same artificial model; and in the next century the vain and worldly prince Pope Urban VIII. was so eaten up with his classical and poetical attainments, that, not content with carrying on the follies of his predecessors, he attempted to remodel, in Horatian metres, even the songs and apophthegms of the Bible, actually forcing the song of praise of the aged Simeon into two Sapphic strophes! Ranke, vol. ii., p. 128. 5. From such doings one is glad to be able to turn at this period to the honest, hearty, and real, if not over-delicate, outbursts of Luther's muse in Germany. Yet after all the transition is not very abrupt; for, although Germany (as also England) in the sixteenth century threw off with the Papal yoke the Roman Latin hymns, yet their leader, unlike the English reformers, applied himself at once to reproduce them in his native tongue; feeling, perhaps, that a musical nation must not be kept without musical expression for their religious sentiments, and that the old familiar melodies would carry their affections into the scale of reformation better than any new compositions. And so gradual and partial was the transfer of the Latin hymns into German, that there remain to this day several translated hymns and carols retaining their refrain, and sometimes interspersed lines and words, in the original Latin, as for example: The The consequence of this is seen in a comparative scarcity of native German hymns written in the early period of the Reformation. Luther himself, however, besides translating or imitating the Latin hymns, some of the Psalms, the Te Deum, Lord's Prayer, &c., wrote several original hymns. most notable of his paraphrases is that of the 46th Psalm, a rough, bold piece, which, with its glorious chorale,* is still the national hymn of German Protestants. sequence of Notker (912), translated by Luther, has an interest for us, as being used in English in our Burial Service; and we must not omit all mention of his original and striking hymn for Easter, Christ lag in Todesbaden.' 6 A From Luther till the seventeenth century Paul Eber and Nicholas Hermann were the only memorable writers; but then the pentup stream, agitated and driven onward by the storm of the Thirty Years' War, rose rapidly to an overwhelming flood, of which Miss Winkworth's two goodly volumes are but a few drops. The most celebrated hymnographers of Germany are, during the seventeenth century, Heermann, Rist, Paul Gerhardt, Angelus, Joachim Neander; and, in the eighteenth, Tersteegen and Franck. The translations of Miss Winkworth are now in every one's hands, and, together with those of her precursors, Miss Cox and Mr. Massie, have made German sacred poetry so familiar to English people that it is almost superfluous to give at length any examples, except by way of comparison with the Latin and other foreign hymnology. The chief characteristic of the earlier German hymns is a certain energy of expression, the impress, probably, of the rough and turbulent times in which they were written: this is especially marked in Luther and in Von Lowenstern, and others who bore the brunt of the religious wars. The following is said to be by Louisa Henrietta, Electress of Brandenburgh in 1635, and is a general favourite: Hymns Ancient and Modern. This hymn, too, which is said by Miss Winkworth to hold the same place in Germany that the Hundredth Psalm does with us,' takes one by storm with its buoyant joyfulness, and excites a strong desire to hear it sung to its fine old tune :'*. 'Now thank we all our God, Who from our mothers' arms Oh! may this bounteous God All praise and thanks to God, The Son, and Him Who reigns The One Eternal God, Amen.' Hymns Ancient and Modern. Lyra Germanica,' ii. preface, p. 6. It is observable that, as the time approaches when in any nation the sacred muse is to depart, a tendency to personal, meditative, subjective writing begins to show itself; the truth of this with the Latins is recorded incidentally by Mr. Neale, and Miss Winkworth bears witness to the saine at the present day in Germany. It began there as far back as the close of the seventeenth century with Johann Franck and Angelus, and was a distinguishing mark of that inimitable writer Tersteegen; this school is well represented in the second volume of the Lyra Germanica,' from which the following, by Angelus, is taken : 'O Love, Who formedst me to wear It would be an omission to pass unnoticed a collection of German hymns, emanating from a body whose influence had so great a share in exciting the Wesleyan movement in England, and especially in moulding its hymnology, as the Moravians or Unitas Fratrum. It was while sailing to America in 1736 that | Wesley first fell in with some members of this community; two years afterwards he spent some time in Germany under the roof of their leader, Count Zinzendorf, himself a hymnwriter. Deeply impressed with their piety, he was the means in return of introducing Mr. William Burgess them into England. traces twenty-four of John Wesley's translations to Moravian and other German sources. If any of our readers have a taste for the curious, we can promise them a treat in an old book, published in 1754, by one of the so-called Bishops of the Moravians in England, entitled A Collection of Hymns of the Children of God in all Ages.' It includes, among many eccentricities, a versification of XXXIX Articles! our Doubtless there is much to interest any one who should trace the subject of hymns through the Asiatic branches, springing from the Syriac; and we know that the Greek hymnologists have their successors in Russia even to this day: witness the Canon by the late Archbishop of Odessa in his' Acathiston,' translated in Voices from the East.' By far the richest treasures of Latin hymnology are found, not in the Roman Service-books, but in the outlying provincial and diocesan Breviaries, the Ambrosian (Milan), the Mozarabic (Old Spanish), the Gallican and German, as those of Amiens, Noyon, Maintz, Liege, the Old English Uses' of Salisbury, York, Hereford, and very many more. The author of 'Christian Life in Song' conducts his readers from Germany to her Lutheran offshoot in |