LII. [Walraff,] Corolla Hymnorum, p. 57.—The poet has drawn his inspiration throughout from the Canticles. The whole of this beautiful composition, is but the further unfolding of the words of the Bride, "I am sick of love." (ii. 5.)

ABELARD.

BELARD was born in 1079 at Palais, near Nantes,

ABELA Rio was 1192. His talents, his vanity, his rare

dialectic dexterity, his rationalism, his relation to a woman of so far nobler and deeper character than his own, the cloistral retirement in which he spent the later years of his stormy life-all these are matters of too familiar knowledge to need to be remembered here. Of his poetry, to which, and to the great popularity which it enjoyed, both he and Heloise more than once allude, it was thought that the greater part had perished. There was indeed an Advent hymn of no high merit, beginning, Mittit ad Virginem Non quemvis angelum, which had been sometimes ascribed to Abelard, (Clichtoveus, Elucidat. Eccles., p. 153,) and a few other verses of no great significance were current under his name. Not many years since, however, six poems were discovered in the Vatican, which undoubtedly are of his composing. They are styled "Lamentations" (planctus,) as of David over Abner, the virgins of Israel over Jephthah's daughter, and are published in Greith's Spicilegium Vaticanum, Frauenfeld, 1838, p. 123–131. I have sought in them in vain any passage which I should care to quote. But this was not all, for about the same time a large body of his hymns, no fewer than ninety-seven, came to light in the Royal Library at Brussels. These last still remain in great part unedited, or did so a year ago. This would be a matter of more keen regret, if Edélestand du Méril

(Poésies Popul. Lat., 1847, p. 439-447) had not published the first eight as a specimen, which are sufficient a good deal to abate the edge of one's desire to see the remainder. Yet not altogether; for that one which finds place below, one of a series on the successive days' work of Creation, of a sort of Hexaëmeron in verse, despite its prosaic commencement and unmelodious rhythm, rests upon a true poetical foundation.

LIII. DIXIT AUTEM DEUS: FIANT LUMINARIA IN FIRMAMENTO COELI.

Gen. i. 14.

RNARUNT terram germina,

Nunc cœlum luminaria;

Sole, lunâ, stellis depingitur,

Quorum multus usus cognoscitur.

LIII. Edélestand du Méril, Poésies Popul. Lat., 1847, p. 444.