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Sancti Spiritus adsit nobis gratia.
We now come to the age of Notkerian Sequences; about which a few words must be said.
It is well known that the origin of sequences themselves is to be looked for in the Alleluia of the Gradual, sung between the Epistle and Gospel. During this melody it was necessary that the deacon should have time to ascend from his place at the altar to the rood-loft, that he might thence sing the Gospel. Hence the prolongation of the last syllable in the Alleluia of the Gradual, in thirty, forty, fifty, or even a hundred notes; the neuma of which ritualistic writers speak so much. True, there was no sense in this last syllable and its lengthening out, but the mystical interpreters had their explanation: 'the way in which we praise GOD in our Country is yet unknown.'
And good people were content for some three hundred years with this service; and, as it has been very truly observed, the attempt itself, if one may use the expression, to explain the sound into sense, manifests a little of the rationalism with which the Eastern has always taunted the Western Church. But, towards the beginning of the eleventh century, there was a certain Swiss monk, by name Notker. The defects