Unsealing now thy deepest heart, Thou findest there, I know, Thy Jesus doth bestow With sweet compulsion. And thy mind By His unsparing hands. Thus may thy Jesus ever be Thy strength, thy glory blest; A tower of strength that shall thy foes Jesu Dulcis Memoria. It is perhaps impossible to render the melodic sweetness of St. Bernard's hymn more sweetly in English metre and English idiom than Caswall has done it. The Doctor Mellifluus found in the liquid Latin at his command a verbal and phrasal honey which he collected from many sources until the honeycomb fairly dripped with its weighted largess. And Caswall seems in his version to have done the same thing with almost equal success in the arid fields of English vocabulary. Doubtless he was justified by the example of St. Bernard himself, in seeking melody as the first of all desirable things in any hymn that should attempt to sing the ineffable sweetness of the name of JESUS. Having paid this tribute to the translator, we feel that we need hardly add the critical charge of unliteralness in the English rendering. Indeed, Caswall disregards — and justly enough-the metre and the rhymic scheme of the original Latin, and is not slow to depart from the thought as well, when a change can bring more music into the translation. Let us instance in illustration the first stanza, than which nothing can be more felicitous, whether we consider the original or its translation: Jesus dulcis memoria, Dans vera cordis gaudia; Jesu! the very thought of Thee With sweetness fills my breast; And in Thy presence rest. It will be observed that the rhymic scheme of the Latin verse (a scheme carried throughout the long poem) is the richest possible; while the translation falls into easier alternating rhymes. The metre, too, of the translation varies from that of the original, and gains in beauty thereby. But in the third line the thought itself of the original is quite changed-and similarly improved upon. "But sweeter far Thy face to see" is not a translation of "Sed super mel et omnia "-not a translation, but an improvement. A request having been made for a new rendering of the hymn into English, we venture to offer one, not as a version superior or even equal to that of Caswall, but simply as a variant one. If it possess any merit, the merit will not be that of sweetness, but of fidelity to the metre, the rhymic scheme, and the thought of the original. The three hymns of the Feast of the Most Holy Name of Jesus are pieced together out of unconnected stanzas of the longer hymn of St. Bernard. Thus, the hymn for Vespers consists of stanzas 1, 2, 3, 5; that for Matins, of stanzas 9, 11, 4, 14; that for Lauds, of stanzas 22, 20, 27, 35. The rhymic device of St. Bernard's hymn forms an exquisite musical setting for the text. The burden of the text is the name of JESUS. As every stanza bears only this sweet burden of thought, so shall every stanza contain but one music of rhyme, which, like the pleasant, continuous jingling of a single bell, shall dominate all the phrasal harmony and assert the ecstasy of a single emotion. The English translation has attempted to imi tate the Latin in this respect. The translations of the three hymns were published, with the above prefatory remarks, in the Ecclesiastical Review (January, 1900). In a subsequent issue of the Review a correspondent questioned the ascription of the authorship to St. Bernard, because Guéranger, in his volume on Le Temps de Noël (II, 324) in the series of L'Année Liturgique, says that there are "incontestable manuscripts" to prove that these hymns are the work of a Benedictine abbess of the 14th century. This question of the authorship of these well-known and well-loved hymns is perhaps of sufficient permanent interest to justify the reproduction, in this place, of the present writer's answer to the question of the correspondent of the Review; Qu. In an article in the January REVIEW the three hymns of the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus are attributed to St. Bernard. Dom Guéranger in his book Le Temps de Noël, tome II, pag. 324, says that there are "incontestable manuscripts" to prove that these hymns are the work of a Benedictine abbess of the fourteenth century. Is Dom Guéranger right? Resp. In the English translation (Christmas, Vol. II) of Dom Guéranger's work, Le Temps de Noël, the passage in which the authorship of the "Jesu dulcis memoria" is denied to St. Bernard, reads: "The two hymns which follow" (he has just given the hymn for Vespers, "Jesu dulcis memoria," and is about to give that for Matins, "Jesus Rex admirabilis," and that for Lauds, "Jesu decus angelicum ") "and which are used by the Church for the Matins and Lauds of the Feast, are by the same writer as the Hymn of Vespers, 'Jesu dulcis memoria.' They were for a long time attributed to St. Bernard, but manuscripts have been found, which prove beyond a doubt, that they were composed by a Holy Abbess of the Order of St. Benedict, who lived in the fourteenth century." Your correspondent asks: "Is Dom Guéranger right?" I answer that he is right in saying that the hymns "were for a long time attributed to St. Bernard," but that he seems to be in error in his ascription of them to an abbess of the fourteenth century. The Bodleian Library contains a MS. which is confidently asserted to be of the twelfth century, and to be probably the original version. It has forty-two stanzas of four lines each. The Bodleian has also another MS. of the thirteenth century, beginning, like the former, with the line "Dulcis Jesu memoria." An Einsiedeln MS. (1288) printed by Morel omits the thirty-ninth stanza. It is to be regretted that Dom Guéranger did not specify the MSS. on which he relied for his opinion, and that he did not mention their locale. However, as he declares that they indicate a fourteenth-century authorship, his contention falls in the presence of MSS. like those in the Bodleian. It must be admitted, however, that, while these early MSS. make it possible to hold that St. Bernard composed the great hymn, they cannot assure us of that fact. And it may yet appear that the learned author of the Année Liturgique was correct in denying the ascription to St. Bernard. The argument pro is apt to rest upon the similarity of some of the stanzas of the hymn to authentic passages in St. Bernard's prose works. Sancti Doctoris venam sapit," as Mabillon says. A beautiful illustration of this is found in the sixth lesson of the Feast (S. Bern. Sermo 15 super Cant.): “Jesus mel in ore, in aure melos, in corde jubilus." Compare this with the stanza of Lauds: Jesu decus angelicum, In corde nectar coelicum. The same Sermo will furnish other illustration of similarity of thought, although not, I think, a similarity of phrase so striking as that just quoted. An argument founded on such a similarity is, nevertheless, open to some suspicion, as Daniel contends (Thes. Hymnol., iv., p. 215). And Mone enumerates six hymns (in one MS.) attributed to the Saint without sufficient reason. Daniel admits the difficulty of ascribing definite authorship: |