Page:The glory of Paradise a rhythmical hymn.djvu/9

 them, (Cathemerinon IX, and Peristephanon I,) which so far excel the Greek models that they do not admit quadrisyllabic and trisyllabic violations of the rhythm. Such also is the celebrated "Pange lingua gloriosi prœlium certaminis" of Venantius Fortunatus, written in the sixth century, and other trochaic hymns earlier than the time of Damiani. But the truth is, that Latin verse composition in general, except when it forced itself to the adoption of Greek models, retained its own native rhythmical character, subject to no rule but that of accentual pronunciation. Such are the trochaics of the Latin dramatists, tragic and comic alike; as, for instance, the familiar line of Terence:—

"Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto;"

or, still more resembling the smooth rhythms of later times:—

"Summum bonum esse heræ putavi hunc Pamphilum."

The hymns, therefore, of Damiani, and those of the few following centuries which precede the revival of classical literature, are to be regarded, not as unshackling themselves from the fetters of verse, but as continuing uninterruptedly, and developing to nobler uses indigenous Latin poetry, now that, with the decay of ancient learning, the authors of Greece, and their Roman imitators, had almost wholly disappeared from view. The addition of rhyme was a natural consequence of the entire abandonment of quantity, and is by no means to be attributed to Saracenic or Gothic influence. In Damiani's trochaics, as in Spanish verse, it is confined mostly to the final vowel; but the construction of all such tetrameter metre requires that it be limited, at all events, to the catalectic and final syllable. When, indeed, as soon afterwards, the verse was divided, the change required the disyllabic or trochee rhyme, which gives new grandeur to such hymns as