Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/268

 2S0 THE CLASSICAL HERITAGE [chap. into the matin hymn, the vfivos dyycXtKos of the Greek liturgy, of which the Latin doxologia magna is the equivalent. These compositions are not metrical, and their structure preserves the parallelism of Hebrew poetry. Thus the earliest poetical expressions of Christian emotion in the Greek tongue were Hebraistic in form. Likewise their contents were more Hebraic than Greek. The Hebrew devotion to God was the prototype of the Christian's love. It had always been unmeasured, absolute, quite different from anything in classic Greek or Latin literature. Now a like devotional feeling was to seek expression in strange languages whose chief poetic forms were dead or academic. Yet, although academic and otherwise unsuited to ex- press Christian feeling, metre was the only form of verse familiar to educated Greek and Latin Christians, and metrical Christian poetry was written in both these tongues. We may trace its failure and early disap- pearance in Greek. In Latin it had some temporary success. In the first place there was a partly pre-Christian Grseco-Jewish hybrid. The earliest portions of the extant pseudo-Sibylline Oracles were composed at Alexandria by Hellenized Jews in the second century before Christ. Judaic Christians added some hundreds of lines toward the close of the first century a.d. ; and in the course of the second and third centuries. Christians or Judaic Christians brought the collection to its present bulk. Much space would be needed to analyze the contents of this series of pseudo-prophetic pictures of the world's history from the creation to the