te sperantium. The Rev. Edward Caswall gave an English reading of the second one in his Lyra Catholica, as follows: Jesu, eternal Shepherd! hear our cry; Increase the faith of all whose souls on Thee rely. The Rhythmus has been translated about twenty-five times into English. The translations of Caswall and Neale have been made with great regard to literalness. Caswall admits, however, three crudenesses in metre; Neale's version is melodious, but admits errors in the rhyming, such as declared as a rhyme with Word, and God with blood. The present writer has essayed a rendering which should seek to be as faithful as the limitations of rhyme and metre would permit, so that the translation might serve to gain the indulgence for those who should recite the hymn in English. Summe Deus Clementiae. This hymn and the following one ("Christus noster vere cibus") belong to the Office of Corpus Christi celebrated locally at Liège by order of its bishop, shortly before Urban IV commissioned St. Thomas to write an Office for the Universal Church. The second hymn was sung at Complin, while the first was distributed among the Little Hours, as it was a custom of the Church of Liège to vary the hymns at these divisions of the Divine Office. The disconnected and almost fragmentary thought, the halting rhythm, the somewhat casual rhyme, combine to make these two hymns a foil for the logical coherence, easy and natural rhythms, and exquisitely sustained rhyme of the hymns of St. Thomas, Dom Morin is convinced that the only borrowing made by the Cistercians (1484-1674) from the primitive Liège office was this hymn for Complin (" Christus noster vere cibus "), which was changed in its first stanza to: Christus lux indeficiens Clement Blume, S.J., thinks 1 that all which can now be assigned to the monk John of Mont-Cornillon, who had been commissioned by the Bl. Juliana to make the first draft of the Office for the local Feast of Corpus Christi, are some hymns and proper antiphons preserved in the Antiphonary of St. Martin at Liège as a supplement to the Roman Office. Dom Morin considers that the compilers of the Cistercian Office made a remarkable work, far beyond the "chétives contributions" of Jean of MontCornillon; and that if they would borrow nothing more than the hymn for Complin from the primitive Liège Office, for a much greater reason must we discard all notion that St. Thomas borrowed from John. Ave Verum Corpus. The hymn is probably a work of the fourteenth century. A Reichenau manuscript cited by Mone (No. 213) declares that the hymn was composed by "Innocentius Papa", and that it has three years of indulgence attached to it by "Pope Leo", but it is impossible from 1 Das Fronleichnams-Fest: seine ersten Urkunden und Offizien in Theologie und Glaube, 1909, I, pp. 337-349. these indications even to conjecture the authorship. One might at first suppose that the great Innocent III (d. 1216) was meant, as various other hymns (such as the Stabat Mater, the Veni Sancte Spiritus) have been attributed to him. But there is no "" Pope Leo" following him, who might have enriched the prayer with an indulgence (Leo IX died in 1054, Leo X ascended the throne of Peter in 1513). It is given as a private devotion at the elevation of the Host, in Horst's Paradisus Animae, printed at Cologne in 1614, and is much used at present as a motet after the Offertory at Mass, or as a hymn at Benediction of the Most Blessed Sacrament. It has received many exquisite musical settings, notable among them being those of Mozart and Gounod. No translation into English, so far as I am aware, attempts to follow the full rhymic scheme of the original. Caswall's older version is found in the Baltimore Manual of Prayers. It has no double rhyme. Oxenham follows the rhythm of the Latin, but varies the rhyme. Donahoe has a longer form of stanza than the original. It is indeed very difficult to reproduce in English, as a translation, a stanza of eight lines with only one change of rhyme, while four of the lines end in dissyllabic rhyme. The original would, however, be imitated by the following attempt at such a translation: Hail, True Body, glorifying For mankind upon the Rood; is The companion hymn, "Ave sacer Christi sanguis ", also of the fourteenth century. Most of it is taken bodily from a longer hymn, "Ave caro Christi cara." Oratio Metrice Composita. Mone gives (I. no. 221) the poem from a manuscript at Mainz, of the fifteenth century. It is written in classical hexameters, which are printed in the present volume in divided form, in order more clearly to show the scheme of internal and end-rhyme. The most notable illustration of this quaint and difficult device is furnished by the long poem of Bernard of Morlas (or Morlaix) De contemptu mundi. Bernard set himself a still more difficult task, of providing double internal rhymes and couplets of end-rhymes, as well as variations (none of them easy) of the rhymic scheme. Thus he has, like the present poem, verses of the form: Menti sincerae possunt haec verba placere; others, in which the rhymes follow the order of the English version of the Oratio metrice composita, e. g.: Quae mea verba monent tu noli tradere vento, and still others in that superabundant form which almost defies equivalent rendering in English: Hora novissima, tempora pessima sunt, vigilemus! Sancti, Venite. In his Medieval Hymns and Sequences, Neale translates the hymn in rhymed iambic pentameters, and remarks that, "Rugged and unpoetical as this hymn is, it has a certain pious simplicity about it which renders it well worthy of preservation." It is found in the Antiphonarium Benchorense, or Antiphonary written in the last quarter of the seventh century at the monastery of Bangor, County Down, Ireland. In the Antiphonary the hymn is headed: "Ymnum Quando Commonicarent Sacerdotes". The Latin text (with the exception of the third stanza) and Neale's translation (improved) are given in Hymns Ancient and Modern (Historical Edition, No. 269). The text as there given is printed in the form of Latin iambic hexameter rhythms, but in Guéranger's Liturgical Year (Time After Pentecost, Vol. I), as also in Daniel's Thesaurus Hymnologicus, Vol. I, the rhythms are divided as in the present volume. This arrangement is perhaps better, as it illustrates the constant recurrence of the rhythmic caesura at the same place, and appears also to indicate that the hymn is not quite so "rugged" as Neale thinks. Daniel considers it conspicuous "nobili quadam simplicitate." A similar sober simplicity of diction and of thought should mark, of course, the translation. Laudes Omnipotens Ferimus Tibi. The hymn was written in the ninth century by Ratpert of St. Gall, in classical Latin elegiac couplets, which have been divided in the present volume into hemistichs, in |