n Poetry_ (2d ed., London, 1864), p. 304.
This admirable book has not been, and from its mixture of taste and
learning is never likely to be, superseded as an introduction to, and
chrestomathy of, the subject. Indeed, if a little touch of orthodox
prudery had not made the Archbishop exclude the _Stabat_, hardly a
hymn of the very first class could be said to be missing in it.]

But immediately afterwards, and more or loss throughout, he redoubles
and redoubles again every possible artifice--sound-repetition in the
_imminet, imminet_, of the third line, alliteration in the _recta
remuneret_ of the fourth, and everywhere trills and _roulades_, not
limited to the actually rhyming syllables of the same vowel--

"Tunc nova gloria pectora sobria clarificabit...
Candida lilia, viva monilia, sunt tibi Sponsa...
Te peto, te colo, te flagro, te volo, canto, saluto."

He has instinctively discovered the necessity of varying as much as
possible the cadence and composition of the last third of his verse,
and carefully avoids anything like a monotonous use of his only
spondee; in a batch of eighteen lines taken at random, there are only
six end-words of two syllables, and these only once rhyme together.
The consequence of these and other devices is that the whole poem is
accompanied by a sort of swirl and eddy of sound and cadence,
constantly varying, constantly shifting its centres and systems, but
always assisting the sense with grateful clash or murmur, according as
it is loud or soft, of word-music.

[Sidenote: _Literary perfection of the Hymns._]

The vernacular languages were not as yet in case to produce anything
so complicated as this, and some of them have never been quite able to
produce it to this day. But it must be obvious at once what a standard
was held up before poets, almost every one of whom, even if he had but
small Latin in a general way, heard these hymns constantly sung, and
what means of producing like effects were suggested to them. The most
varied and charming lyric of the Middle Ages, that of the German
Minnesingers, shows the effect of this Latin practice side by side, or
rather inextricably mingled, with the effects of the preciser French
and Provencal verse-scheme, and the still looser but equally musical,
though half-inarticulate, suggestions of indigenous song. That English
prosody--the prosody of Shakespeare and Coleridge, of Shelley and
Keats--owes its origin to a similar admixture th