early or quite the most perfect wedding of
sound to sense that they know.

[Footnote 8: A few more precise dates may be useful. St Bernard,
1091-1153; Bernard of Morlaix, exact years uncertain, but twelfth
century; Adam of St Victor, _ob. cir._ 1190; Jacopone da Todi, _ob._
1306; St Bonaventura, 1221-1274; Thomas of Celano, _fl. c._ 1226. The
two great storehouses of Latin hymn-texts are the well-known books of
Daniel, _Thesaurus Hymnologicus_, and Mone, _Hymni Latini Medii AEvi_.
And on this, as on all matters connected with hymns, the exhaustive
_Dictionary of Hymnology_ (London, 1892) of the Rev. John Julian will
be found most valuable.]

[Sidenote: _The_ Dies Irae.]

It would be possible, indeed, to illustrate a complete dissertation on
the methods of expression in serious poetry from the fifty-one lines
of the _Dies Irae_. Rhyme, alliteration, cadence, and adjustment of
vowel and consonant values,--all these things receive perfect
expression in it, or, at least, in the first thirteen stanzas, for the
last four are a little inferior. It is quite astonishing to reflect
upon the careful art or the felicitous accident of such a line as

"Tuba mirum spargens sonum,"

with the thud of the trochee[9] falling in each instance in a
different vowel; and still more on the continuous sequence of five
stanzas, from _Judex ergo_ to _non sit cassus_, in which not a word
could be displaced or replaced by another without loss. The climax of
verbal harmony, corresponding to and expressing religious passion and
religious awe, is reached in the last--

"Quaerens me sedisti lassus,
Redemisti crucem passus:
Tantus labor non sit cassus!"--

where the sudden change from the dominant _e_ sounds (except in the
rhyme foot) of the first two lines to the _a_'s of the last is simply
miraculous, and miraculously assisted by what may be called the
internal sub-rhyme of _sedisti_ and _redemisti_. This latter effect
can rarely be attempted without a jingle: there is no jingle here,
only an ineffable melody. After the _Dies Irae_, no poet could say that
any effect of poetry was, as far as sound goes, unattainable, though
few could have hoped to equal it, and perhaps no one except Dante and
Shakespeare has fully done so.

[Footnote 9: Of course no one of the four is a pure classical trochee;
but all obey the trochaic _rhythm_.]

Beside the grace and the grandeur, the passion and the art, of this
wonderful composition, eve