Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/275

 Tx] GREEK CHRISTIAN POETRY 257 confused sentiments did not allow him to express dis- tinctly Christian feeling. It was quite different with the fervent Gregory Nazianzen, whose pulpit oratory held Christian hearts enthralled. His was a poetic, emotional nature; his rhetorical powers were great; and he composed many metrical hymns quite Chris- tian in their sentiments. But they never touched the people, as his sermons moved them; nor were they ever taken into the liturgy. They afford an example of compositions according with the literary taste of the latter part of the fourth century, a taste so trained in classical poetry and metre that it could not readily conceive of poetry based on other principles. Such academic taste was scarcely conscious that metre no longer bore any real relation to the sound of living speech, and that metrical poems in consequence could no longer possess the breath of life. There was, however, a living speech and utterance based upon that which makes a polysyllabic word a unity and gives to spoken language rhythm and emphasis. This was the word-accent. Although col- loquial language was not cast in the balanced periods of orators, and oratorical utterance outsoared common speech, accent was as dominant in one as in the other. However, as metre was the only principle of verse- structure recognized in the Greek world, all unmetri- cal compositions were regarded as prose. The Old Testament, as used by the Eastern Church, was a translation from the Hebrew; and the New Testament was written in a Semitically influenced Greek which expressed thought simply and directly, regardless of rhetorical conventions. Both Testaments were un-