Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/286

 268 THE CLASSICAL HERITAGE [chap. quality or enable the poet to perfect the unison of sentiment aud verse.^ Thus a number of wonderful verse-forms and rhymes came into being, fitted to express the emotion which through the centuries had been gathering in Christian souls. A voice had thus been found for the feelings roused by the Gospel story, including those which might be attributed to Gospel personages, as in the Stabat Mater, through which wells the grief of the Virgin at the Cross. Similarly Christian hymns may tell the story of martyrs lyri- cally, and utter the feeling excited by their saintly heroism and blessed lot.^ We pass to the Latin poems which combine lyric with narrative or dramatic elements. The lyric ele- ment consists either in devotional feeling toward Christ or some martyred saint having power to aid, or in saddened loving sentiments touching the subject of the poem, living or dead. In the former case the poem is of the nature of a hymn, in the latter of the 1 E.g.f in the Heri mundus ezultavit, and other hymns in like metre. 2 In these references to the change from metrical to accentual verse it is not intended to imply that the disintegration of metre was due to Christianity; for it was primarily due to the falling away of quantity from the Greek and Latin tongues, — and Latin may have always had its popular accentual verses. The Christian genius, seeking to express itself in poetry in the centuries when quantity was no longer observed in speaking, gradually availed itself of accent, which as the basis of actual speech was now the natural basis for living verse ; and, in fact, forms of accentual verse were evolved suited to the expression of Christian feeling. It is the writer's opinion that Christian feeling could not have been as adequately expressed in classic metres, which had been evolved in correspondence with the expression of quite different kinds of feeling.