Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/280

 262 THE CLASSICAL HERITAGE [chap. Romanes was the greatest of Greek hymn writers. Yet he was not the author of perhaps the most cele- brated hymn of the Greek Church, the 'AKa^wrros of Sergios, so called because it was sung with the con- gregation standing. This magnificent and prolonged chant of adoration to the Virgin, uttered by all crea- tures, appears to have been written in 625. After this time, though the liturgic poetry of the Greek Church made some formal progress, the period of poetic decline soon, set in. in. Early Latin Christian Poetry Latin Christian poetry differed in many ways from the Christian poetry of the Hellenic East. In the West, metre was abandoned more slowly,^ and accent- ual verse came through a different process. The Greek accentual verse was not reached through sub- stitution of accent for quantity in the old metrical forms of poetry, but had its antecedents in Greek rhythmic prose. In Latin Church poetry, quantity gradually gave way to accent, while some of the metrical forms of verse were retained. Accentual verse, so derived, tended for some centuries to keep to strophes composed of lines of the same rhythm and 1 The long maintenance of metre in Christian Latin poetry was not unconnected with the circumstance that Latin, as written, was becoming a learned language, in diminishing correspondence with the common speech of daily life ; poetry written in it would not be so strongly drawn from metre to accentual rhythm by the actuali- ties of speech. In daily life men used the vulgar Latin, which was turning into Proyen9al, French, Spanish, and Italian.