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 IX] CLASSIC METRE AND CHRISTIAN EMOTION 245 soul could not express itself in artificial verse. It needed poetic forms which should draw their life from living speech as the classic metres had drawn theirs. There were other reasons why the old metres were not suited to Christian poetry. The spirit of Chris- tianity was not the spirit of paganism. Christian emo- tion differed from the emotions of pagan life or pagan literature, and, if it was to become articulate in poetry, it must evolve its own forms of verse. Control, mod- eration, and inclusiveness were characteristic of the emotions as expressed in classic Greek and Latin po- etry. Christian emotion was to be characterized by qualities the opposite of these. Control, moderation, inclusiveness, were absent. Instead, there were both excess and exclusion. The classic fxrj^kv dyav was aban- doned; the Christian heart could not hold too much love of God. There was no bound to the passion with which the soul should cast itself down before Him. Then there was exclusion. For as Christianity was interpreted in the fourth century and through the Middle Ages it excluded one side of human emo- tion. True, in the love of God there might be a larger inclusiveness than in the pagan range of feeling; it might hold the proportionment of all mortal affections, as Augustine saw. But the appli- cation of such thoughts was defeated by the causes which were making monasticism the ideal of Chris- tian life. Again, emotion as expressed in classic literature loar, definite, and finite. Christian emotion was LM tviiow neither clarity nor measure. Its supreme