is the opening hexameter in his Epistle to his friend Ratramnus.[306] To what horrid jingle such verses could attain may be seen from some leonine hexameter-pentameters of two or three hundred years later, on the Fall of Troy, beginning:

Hector and Troy, and the dire wiles of the Greeks never left the mediaeval imagination. A poem of the early tenth century, which bade the watchers on Modena’s walls be vigilant, draws its inspiration from that unfading memory, and for us illustrates what iambics might become when accent had replaced quantity. The lines throughout end in a final rhyming a.

And from a scarcely later time, for it also is of the tenth century, rise those verses to Roma, that old “Roma aurea et eterna,” and forever “caput mundi,” sung by pilgrim bands as their eyes caught the first gleam of tower, church, and ruin:

This verse, which still lifts the heart of whosoever hears or reads it, may close our examples of mediaeval verses descended from metrical forms. It will be noticed that all of them are from the early mediaeval centuries; a circumstance which may be taken as a suggestion of the fact that by far the greater part of the earlier accentual Latin poetry was composed in forms in which accent simply had displaced the antique quantity.

III

We turn to that other genesis of mediaeval Latin verse, arising not out of antique forms, but rather from the mediaeval need and faculty of song. In the chief instance selected for illustration, this line of evolution took its inception in the exigencies and inspiration of the Alleluia chant or jubilation. During the celebration of the Mass, as the Gradual ended in its last Alleluia, the choir continued chanting the final syllable of that word in cadences of musical exultings. The melody or cadence to which this final a of the Alleluia was chanted, was called the sequentia. The words which came to be substituted for its cadenced reiteration were called the prosa. By the twelfth century the two terms seem to have been used interchangeably. Thus arose the prose Sequence, so plastic in its capability of being moulded by melody to verse. Its songful qualities lay in the sonorousness of the words and in their syllabic correspondence with the notes of the melody to which they were sung.[310]

In the year 860, Norsemen sacked the cloister of Jumièges in Normandy, and a fleeing brother carried his precious Antiphonary far away to the safe retreat of St. Gall. There a young monk named Notker, poring over its contents, perceived that words had been written in the place of the repetitions of the final a of the Alleluia. Taking the cue, he set to work to compose more fitting words to correspond with the notes to which this final a was sung. So these lines of euphonious and fitting words appear to have had their beginning in Notker’s scanning of that fugitive Antiphonary, and his devising labour. Their primary purpose was a musical one; for they were a device—mnemotechnic, if one will—to facilitate the chanting of cadences previously vocalized with difficulty through the singing of one simple vowel sound. Notker showed his work to his master, Iso, who rejoiced at what his gifted pupil had accomplished, and spurred him on by pointing out that in his composition one syllable was still sometimes repeated or drawn out through several successive notes. One syllable to each note was the principle which Notker now set himself to realize; and he succeeded.

He composed some fifty Sequences. In his work, as well as in that of others after him, the device of words began to modify and develop the melodies themselves. Sometimes Notker adapted his verbal compositions to those cadences or melodies to which the Alleluia had long been sung; sometimes he composed both melody and words; or, again, he took a current melody, sacred or secular, to which the Alleluia never had been sung, and composed words for it, to be chanted as a Sequence. In these borrowed melodies, as well as in those composed by Notker, the musical periods were more developed than in the Alleluia cadences. Thus the musical growth of the Sequences was promoted by the use of sonorous words, while the improved melodies in turn drew the words on to a more perfect rhythmic ordering.

Notker died in 912. His Sequences were prose, yet with a certain parallelism in their construction; and, even with Notker in his later years, the words began to take on assonances, chiefly in the vowel sound of a. Thereafter the melodies, seizing upon the words, as it were, by the principle of their syllabic correspondence to the notation, moulded them to rhythm of movement and regularity of line; while conversely with the better ordering of the words for singing, the melodies in turn made gain and progress, and then again reacted on the words, until after two centuries there emerged the finished verses of an Adam of St. Victor.

Thus these Sequences have become verse before our eyes, and we realize that it is the very central current of the evolution of mediaeval Latin poetry that we have been following. How free and how spontaneous was this evolution of the Sequence. It was the child of the Christian Middle Ages, seeing the light in the closing years of the ninth century, but requiring a long period of growth before it reached the glory of its climacteric. It was born of musical chanting, and it grew as song, never unsung or conceived of as severable from its melody. Only as it attained its perfected strophic forms, it necessarily made use of trochaic and other rhythms which long before had changed from quantity to accent and so had passed on into the verse-making habitudes of the Middle Ages.[311] If there be any Latin composition in virtue of origin and growth absolutely un-antique, it is the mediaeval Sequence, which in its final forms is so glorious a representative of the mediaeval Hymn. And we shall also see that much popular Latin poetry, “Carmina Burana” and student-songs, were composed in verses and often sung to tunes taken—or parodied—from the Sequence-hymns of the Liturgy.

There were many ways of chanting Sequences. The musical phrases of the melodies usually were repeated once, except at the beginning and the close; and the Sequence would be rendered by a double choir singing antiphonally. Ordinarily the words responded to the repetition of the musical phrases with a parallelism of their own. The lines (after the first) varied in length by pairs, the second and third lines having the same number of syllables, the fourth and fifth likewise equal to each other, but differing in length from the second and third; and so on through the Sequence, until the last line, which commonly stood alone and differed in length from the preceding pairs. The Sequence called “Nostra tuba” is a good example. Probably it was composed by Notker, and in his later years; for it is filled with assonances, and exhibits a regular parallelism of structure.

Here, after the opening, the first pair has seventeen syllables, and the next pair twenty-six. The last pair quoted has twenty; and the final line of seventeen syllables has no fellow. A further rhythmical advance seems reached by the following Sequence from the abbey of St. Martial at Limoges. It may have been written in the eleventh century. It is given here with the first and second line of the couplets opposite to each other, as strophe and antistrophe; and the lines themselves are divided to show the assonances (or rhymes) which appear to have corresponded with pauses in the melody:

A Sequence of the eleventh century will afford a final illustration of approach to a regular strophic structure, and of the use of the final one-syllable rhyme in a, throughout the Sequence:

As the eleventh century closed and the great twelfth century dawned, the forces of mediaeval growth quickened to a mightier vitality, and distinctively mediaeval creations appeared. Our eyes, of course, are fixed upon the northern lands, where the Sequence grew from prose to verse, and where derivative or analogous forms of popular poetry developed also. Up to this time, throughout mediaeval life and thought, progress had been somewhat uncrowned with palpable achievement. Yet the first brilliant creations of a master-workman are the fruit of his apprentice years, during which his progress has been as real as when his works begin to make it visible. So it was no sudden birth of power, but rather faculties ripening through apprentice centuries, which illumine the period opening about the year 1100. This period would carry no human teaching if its accomplishment in institutions, in philosophy, in art and poetry, had been a heaven-blown accident, and not the fruit of antecedent discipline.

The poetic advance represented by the Sequences of Adam of St. Victor may rouse our admiration for the poet’s genius, but should not blind our eyes to the continuity of development leading to it. Adam is the final artist and his work a veritable creation; yet his antecedents made part of his creative faculty. The elements of his verses and the general idea and form of the sequence were given him;—all honour to the man’s holy genius which made these into poems. The elements referred to consisted in accentual measures and in the two-syllabled Latin rhyme which appears to have been finally achieved by the close of the eleventh century.[315] In using them Adam was no borrower, but an artist who perforce worked in the medium of his art. Trochaic and iambic rhythms then constituted the chief measures for accentual verse, as they had for centuries, and do still. For, although accentual rhythms admit dactyls and anapaests, these have not proved generally serviceable. Likewise the inevitable progress of Latin verse had developed assonances into rhymes; and indeed into rhymes of two syllables, for Latin words lend themselves as readily to rhymes of two syllables as English words to rhymes of one.

There existed also the idea and form of the Sequence, consisting of pairs of lines which had reached assonance and some degree of rhythm, and varied in length, pair by pair, following the music of the melodies to which they were sung. For the Sequence-melody did not keep to the same recurring tune throughout, but varied from couplet to couplet. In consequence, a Sequence by Adam of St. Victor may contain a variety of verse-forms. Moreover, a number of the Sequences of which he may have been the author show survivals of the old rhythmical irregularities, and of assonance as yet unsuperseded by pure rhyme.

Before giving examples of Adam’s poems, a tribute should be paid to his great forerunner in the art of Latin verse. Adam doubtless was familiar with the hymns[316] of the most brilliant intellectual luminary of the departing generation, one Peter Abaelard, whom he may have seen in the flesh. Those once famous love-songs, written for Heloïse, perished (so far as we know) with the love they sang. Another fate—and perhaps Abaelard wished it so—was in store for the many hymns which he wrote for his sisters in Christ, the abbess and her nuns. They still exist,[317] and display a richness of verse-forms scarcely equalled even by the Sequences of Adam. In the development of Latin verse, Abaelard is Adam’s immediate predecessor; his verses being, as it were, just one stage inferior to Adam’s in sonorousness of line, in certainty of rhythm, and in purity of rhyme.

The “prose” Sequences were not the direct antecedents of Abaelard’s hymns. Yet both sprang from the freely devising spirit of melody and song; and therefore those hymns are of this free-born lineage more truly than they are descendants of antique forms. To be sure, every possible accentual rhythm, built as it must be of trochees, iambics, anapaests, or dactyls, has unavoidably some antique quantitative antecedent; because the antique measures exhausted the possibilities of syllabic combination. Yet antecedence is not source, and most of Abaelard’s verses by their form and spirit proclaim their genesis in the creative exigencies of song as loudly as they disavow any antique parentage.

For example, there may be some far echo of metrical asclepiads in the following accentual and rhyme-harnessed twelve-syllable verse:

But the echo if audible is faint, and surely no antique whisper is heard in

Nor in

The variety of Abaelard’s verse seems endless. One or two further examples may or may not suggest any antecedents in those older forms of accentual verse which followed the former metres:

In this verse the first two lines are accentual iambic dimeters; while the last two begin each with two trochees, and close apparently with two dactyls. The last form of line is kept throughout in the following:

Next come some simple five-syllable lines, with a catching rhyme:

In the following lines of ten syllables a dactyl appears to follow a trochee twice in each line:

These examples of Abaelard’s rhythms may close with the following curiously complicated verse:

In general, one observes in these verses that Abaelard does not use a pure two-syllable rhyme. The rhyme is always pure in the last syllable, and in the penult may either exist as a pure rhyme or simply as an assonance, or not at all.[318]

Probably Abaelard wrote his hymns in 1130, perhaps the very year when Adam as a youth entered the convent of St. Victor, lying across the Seine from Paris. The latter appears to have lived until 1192. Many Sequences have been improperly ascribed to him, and among the doubtful ones are a number having affinities with the older types. These may be anterior to Adam; for the greater part of his unquestionable Sequences are perfected throughout in their versification. Yet, on the other hand, one would expect some progression in works composed in the course of a long life devoted to such composition—a life covering a period when progressive changes were taking place in the world of thought beyond St. Victor’s walls. We take three examples of these Sequences. The first contains occasional assonance in place of rhyme, and uses many rhymes of one syllable. It appears to be an older composition improperly ascribed to Adam. The second is unquestionably his, in his most perfect form; the third may or may not be Adam’s; but is given for its own sake as a lovely lyric.[319]

The first example, probably written not much later than the year 1100, was designed for the Mass at the dedication of a church. The variety in the succession of couplets and strophes indicates a corresponding variation in the melody.

The second example is Adam’s famous Sequence for St. Stephen’s Day, which falls on the day after Christmas. It is throughout sustained and perfect in versification, and in substance a splendid hymn of praise.

The last example, in honour of St. Nicholas’s Day, is a lovely poem by whomsoever written. Its verses are extremely diversified. It begins with somewhat formal chanting of the saint’s virtues, in dignified couplets. Suddenly it changes to a joyful lyric, and sings of a certain sweet sea-miracle wrought by Nicholas. Then it spiritualizes the conception of his saintly aid to meet the call of the sin-tossed soul. It closes in stately manner in harmony with its liturgical function.

The foregoing examples of religious poetry may be supplemented by illustrations of the parallel evolution of more profane if not more popular verse. Any priority in time, as between the two, should lie with the former; though it may be the truer view to find a general synchronism in the secular and religious phases of lyric growth. But priority of originality and creativeness certainly belongs to that line of lyric evolution which sprang from religious sentiments and emotions. For the vagrant clerkly poet of the Court, the roadside, and the inn, used the forms of verse fashioned by the religious muse in the cloister and the school. Thus the development of secular Latin verse presents a derivative parallel to the essentially primary evolution of the Sequence or the hymn.

It was in Germany that the composition of Sequences was most zealously cultivated during the century following Notker’s death; and it was in Germany that the Sequence, in its earlier forms, exerted most palpable influence upon popular songs.[323] In these so-called Modi (Modus == song), as in the Sequence, rhythmical compositions may be seen progressing in the direction of regular rhythm, rhyme, and strophic form. As in the Sequences, the tune moulded the words, which in turn influenced the melody. The following is from the Modus Ottinc, a popular song composed about the year 1000 in honour of a victory of Otto III. over the Hungarians:

Another example is the Modus florum of approximately the same period, a song about a king who promised his daughter to whoever could tell such a lie as to force the king to call him a liar. It opens as follows:

Here the rhyme still is rude and the rhythm irregular. The following dirge, written thirty or forty years later on the death of the German emperor, Henry II., shows improvement:

We may pass on into the twelfth century, still following the traces of that development of popular verse which paralleled the evolution of the Sequence. We first note some catchy rhymes of a German student setting out for Paris in quest of learning and intellectual novelty:

This Suabian, singing his uncouth Latin rhymes, and footing his way to Paris, suggests the common, delocalized influences which were developing a mass of student-songs, “Carmina Burana,” or “Goliardic” poetry. The authors belonged to that large and broad class of clerks made up of any and all persons who knew Latin. The songs circulated through western Europe, and their home was everywhere, if not their origin. Some of them betray, as more of them do not, the author’s land and race. Frequently of diabolic cleverness, gibing, amorous, convivial, they show the virtuosity in rhyme of their many makers. Like the hymns and later Sequences, they employed of necessity those accentual measures which once had their quantitative prototypes in antique metres. But, again like the hymns and Sequences, they neither imitate nor borrow, but make use of trochaic, iambic, or other rhythms as the natural and unavoidable material of verse. Their strophes are new strophes, and not imitations of anything in quantitative poetry. So these songs were free-born, and their development was as independent of antique influence as the melodies which ever moulded them to more perfect music. Many and divers were their measures. But as that great strophe of Adam’s Heri mundus exultavit (the strophe of the Stabat Mater) was of mightiest dominance among the hymns, so for these student-songs there was also one measure that was chief. This was the thirteen-syllable trochaic line, with its lilting change of stress after the seventh syllable, and its pure two-syllable rhyme. It is the line of the Confessio poetae, or Confessio Goliae, where nests that one mediaeval Latin verse which everybody still knows by heart:

It is also the line of the quite charming Phyllis and Flora of the Carmina Burana:

Another common measure is the twelve-syllable dactylic line of the famous Apocalypsis Goliae Episcopi:

An example of the not infrequent eight-syllable line is afforded by that tremendous satire against papal Rome, beginning: