and form. He wrote two famous hymns, one of them in the popular trochaic tetrameter, the other in the equally simple iambic dimeter. The first, a hymn to the Cross, begins with the never-to-be-forgotten
"Pange, lingua, gloriosi proelium certaminis";
and has such lines as
"Crux fidelis, inter omnes arbor una nobilis
| · | · | · | · | · |
Dulce lignum, dulce clavo dulce pondus sustinens!"
In these the mediaeval feeling for the Cross shows itself, and while the metre is correct, it is so facile that one may read or sing the lines accentually. In the other hymn, also to the Cross, assonance and rhyme foretell the coming transformation of metre to accentual verse. Here are the first two stanzas:
"Vexilla regis prodeunt,
Fulget crucis mysterium,
Quo carne carnis conditor
Suspensus est patibulo.
Confixa clavis viscera
Tendens manus, vestigia
Redemtionis gratia
Hic immolata est hostia."
Passing to the Carolingian epoch, some lines from a poem celebrating the victory of Charlemagne's son Pippin over the Avars in 796, will illustrate the popular trochaic tetrameter which had become accentual, and already tended to rhyme:
"Multa mala iam fecerunt ab antico tempore,
Fana dei destruxerunt atque monasteria,
Vasa aurea sacrata, argentea, fictilia."[1]
Next we turn to a piece by the persecuted and interesting Gottschalk, written in the latter part of the ninth century. A young lad has asked for a poem. But how can he sing, the exiled and imprisoned monk who might rather weep as the Jews by the waters of Babylon?[2] yet he will sing a hymn
