Page:The seven great hymns of the mediaeval church - 1902.djvu/76

46 and even poees o trange a gift of facination, a gift in which no other compoition equals and but one other approaches it, that the very found of its words will allure him who is ignorant of their meaning.

This marvellous power cannot be meaured and defined, yet a ditinguished American clergyman has thus cloely analyzed it: "Combining omewhat of the rhythm of claical Latin, with the rhymes of the mediæval Latin, treating of a theme full of awful ublimity, and grouping together the mot tartling imagery of Scripture as to the lat Judgment, and throwing this into yet tronger relief by the barbaric implicity of the tyle in which it is et, and adding to all these its full and trumpet-like cadences, and uniting with the impaioned feelings of the South, whence it emanated, the gravity of the North, whose everer tyle it adopted."—Dr. W. R. Williams.

The Great Hymn has ever allured and eluded tranlators. Its apparent artlenes and implicity indicate that it can be turned readily into another language, but its ecret power refues to