Mr. Orby Shipley, in his Annus Sanctus (London, 1884), gives a large number of these early versions from the Roman Catholic Primers of 1619, 1684, 1685, and 1706; from the Evening Office of 1710, 1725, and 1785; and from the Divine Office of 1763 and 1780. The translations of 1619 have been ascribed to William Drummond, of Hawthornden, and those of 1706 to Dryden. Drummond was the first Scotchman who adopted English as the language of literature, and although a Protestant, he belonged to the Catholicizing party represented by William Forbes, the first Protestant bishop of Edinburgh. Three hymns are given in Sir Walter Scott’s edition of Dryden on the authority of English Roman Catholic tradition, the best known being his version of the Veni Creator Spiritus. These three are found in the Primer of 1706, along with versions of the other hymns of the Roman Breviary sufficiently like them to suggest that they are all by the same hand. But this judgment is disputed.

Among Protestants the neglect was as great. So profuse a writer of hymns for the Christian year as George Wither translated only the Te Deum and the Veni, Creator Spiritus into English verse.[29] Tate and Brady, in their Supplement (1703) to their New Version of the Psalms (1696), published a translation of the Veni, Creator Spiritus. But Bishop Symon Patrick was the only hymn-writer of that age who may be said to have given any special attention to Latin hymns. His hymns were chiefly translations from that source, especially Prudentius, and Lord Selborne mentions that of Alleluia, dulce carmen, as the best.

The Methodist revival, which did so much to enrich our store of hymns, and which called attention anew to those of Germany, accomplished nothing for us as regards Latin hymns. The Earl of Roscommon’s translation of the Dies Irae (1717), and Dr. Johnson’s affecting reference to the stanza,

Quaerens me sedisti lassus, ...

stand almost alone in that age. It was not until the Romantic movement in Germany and then in England broke the bonds of a merely classic culture, taught the world the beauty of Gothic art, and obliged men to revise their estimate of the Middle Ages, that the singers of the praises which sounded through those earlier centuries had a fair chance to be judged at their real worth. The forerunner of that movement was Johann Gottfried von Herder, who indeed may be said to have anticipated the whole intellectual movement of the past century, Darwinism not excepted. From his friend and master Hamann, “the Magus of the North,” he had learned “the necessity for a complete and harmonious expression of all the varied faculties of man,” and that “whatever is isolated or the product of a single faculty is to be condemned.” This made him as much discontented with the eighteenth century and its literature and philosophy of the enlightened understanding, as Hamann himself was. It was the foundation for that Catholic taste which enabled him to appreciate the excellence of all those popular literatures which are the outflow of the life of whole peoples. His Voices of the Peoples did for the Continent what Bishop Percy’s Reliques did for England, and did it much better. He saw that “the people and a common sentiment are the foundations of a true poetry,” and the literature of the schools and that of polite society are equally condemned to sterility. For this reason he had small respect for that classic Latin literature at whose bar every modern production was impleaded. He found far more genuine life and power in the Latin poems of the Jesuit father, Jacob Balde, and still more in the hymns of the Latin Church. His Letters for the Promotion of Humanity (1794-96) contain a passage of classic importance:

“The hymns which Christianity introduced had for their basis those old Hebrew Psalms which very soon found their way into the Church, if not as songs or anthems, at any rate as prayers.... The songs of Mary and of Zacharias, the Angelic Salutation, the Nunc Dimittis of Simeon, which open the New Testament, gave character more immediately to the Christian hymns. Their gentler voice was more suitable to the spirit of Christianity than even the loud trumpet note of that old jubilant Hallelujah, although that note was found capable of many applications, and was now strengthened with the words of prophet or psalmist, now adapted to gentler strains. Over the graves of the dead, whose resurrection was already present to the spirit’s vision, in caves and catacombs, first were heard these psalms of repentance and prayer, of sorrow and hope, until after the public establishment of Christianity, they stepped out of the dark into the light, out of solitude into splendid churches, before consecrated altars, and now assumed a like splendor in their expression. There is hardly any one who can listen to the Jam moesta quiesce querula of Prudentius without feeling his heart touched by its moving strains, or who can hear the funeral sequence Dies irae, dies illa, without a shudder, or whom so many other hymns, each with its own character—e.g., Veni, Redemptor gentium; Vexilla Regis prodeunt; Salvete flores Martyrum; Pange, lingua, gloriosi, etc., will fail to be carried into that frame of feeling which each seeks to awaken, and with all its humility of form and its churchly peculiarities, never fails to command. In one there sounds the voice of prayer; another could find its accompaniment only in the harp; in yet another the trumpet rings, or there sounds the thousand-voiced organ, and so on.

“If we seek after the reason of this remarkable effect, which we feel in hearing these old Christian hymns, we find it somewhat peculiar. It is anything but the novelty of the thoughts which here touches and there shakes us. Thoughts in these hymns are found but sparingly. Many are merely solemn recitations of a well-known story, or they are familiar petitions and prayers. They nearly all repeat each other. Nor is it frequently surprisingly fine and novel sentiments with which they somehow permeate us; the novel and the fine are not objects in the hymns. What, then, is it that touches us? Simplicity and Veracity. Here sounds the speech of a general confession of one heart and one faith. Most of them are constructed either so as to be fit for use every day of the year, or so as to be used on the festivals of the various seasons. As these come round there comes with them in constant recurrence their rehearsal of Christian doctrines. There is nothing superfine in the hymns as regards either emotion, or duty, or consolation. There reigns in all of them a general popularity of content, expressed in great accents. He who seeks novel thoughts in a Te Deum or a Salve Regina looks for them in the wrong place. It is just what is every day and always known, which here is to serve as the garb of truth. The hymn is meant to be an ambrosial offering of nature, deathless like that, and ever returning.

“It follows that, as people in these Christian hymns did not look for the grace of classic expression or the pleasurable emotion of the instant—in a word, what we expect from a work of art, they produced the strangest effects at once after their introduction. Just as Christian hands overthrew the statues and temples of the gods in honor of the unseen God, so these hymns contained a germ which was to bring about the death of the pagan poetry. Not only were those hymns to gods and goddesses, heroes and geniuses, regarded by the Christians as the work of unbelievers or misbelievers, but the germ from which they sprang, the poetic and sportive fancy, the pleasure and rejoicing of the peoples in their national festivals, were condemned as a school of evil demons; yes, even the national pride, to which those songs appealed, was despised as a perilous though splendid sin. The old religion had outlived its time, the new had won its victory, when the absurdity of idol-worship and pagan superstitions, the disorders and abominations which attended the festivals of Bacchus, Cybele, and Aphrodite, were brought to the light of day. Whatever of poetry was associated with these was a work of the devil. There began a new age for poetry, music, speech, the sciences, and indeed for the whole direction of human thought.”

As the Romanticist movement gained ground in Germany, attention to the early hymns increased. Even Goethe, the weltkind among the prophets, was influenced. Hence his use of the Dies Irae in the first part of Faust, although he was pagan enough to care for nothing at Assisi except the Roman remains. A. W. Schlegel made a number of translations for the Musen-Almanach. Then came the long series of German translators, of whom A. J. Rambach, A. L. Follen (brother of Professor Charles Follen of Harvard), Karl Simrock (1850 and 1866), and G. A. Koenigsfeld (1847 and 1865) are the most notable. Much more important to us are the German collectors: G. A. BjÖrn (a Dane, 1818), J. C. von Zabuesnig (1822 and 1830), H. A. Daniel (BlÜthenstrauss, 1840; Thesaurus, 1841-56), F. J. Mone (1853-55), C. B. Moll (1861 and 1868), P. Gall Morel (1866), Joseph Kehrein (1873). To the unwearied thoroughness of these editors, more than of any other laborers in this field, we owe our ampler access to the treasures of Latin hymnody. But what field of research is there in which the scholarship of Germany has not laid the rest of the world under obligations?

In English literature the Romanticist movement begins properly with Sir Walter Scott. Himself a Presbyterian, he was brought up on the old Scotch Psalm-book, for which he entertained the same affection as did Burns, Edward Irving, Campbell, Carlyle, and Archdeacon Hare. He opposed any attempt to improve it, on the ground that it was, “with all its acknowledged occasional harshness, so beautiful that any alterations must eventually prove only so many blemishes.” But his literary tastes led him to a lofty appreciation of the Anglican liturgy—a circumstance which has led many to class him as an Episcopalian—and equally for the poetry of the mediaeval hymns. His vigorous version of a part of the Dies Irae inserted in The Lady of the Lake (1805) gives him his smallest claim to mention in the history of hymnody. It was the new atmosphere he carried into the educated world, his fresh and hearty admiration of admirable things in the Middle Ages, which had been thought barbarous, that makes him important to us. He gave the English and Scottish people new weights and measures, new standards of critical judgment, which emancipated them from narrow, pseudo-Protestant traditions. He made the great Church of undivided Western Europe intelligible. No doubt many follies resulted from this novel lesson, the worst of all being contempt for Luther and his associates in the Reformation. The negations which attend such revolutions in opinion always are foolish exaggerations. It is the affirmations which are valuable and which remain. And Romanticism for more than half a century has been affecting the religious, the social, the intellectual life of Great Britain and America in a thousand ways, and with, on the whole, positive and beneficial results. Its most powerful manifestation was in the Oxford movement,[30] but both in its causes and its effects it has transcended the limits which separate the divided forces of Protestantism.

Naturally the Oxford movement was the first to turn attention to the hymns of the Middle Ages, or what it regarded as such. We use this qualified expression because its leaders at the outset were much better poets than hymnological scholars, and welcomed anything in the shape of a Latin hymn as “primitive,” no matter what. Isaac Williams, in the British Magazine in 1830, published a series of translations of “primitive hymns” which he gathered into a volume in 1839. They were from the Paris Breviary, of whose hymns only one in fourteen were older than 1685, and most of them not yet a hundred years old. Rev. John Chandler, in his Hymns of the Primitive Church (1837), drew on Santeul and Coffin with equal freedom, evidently supposing he was going back to the early ages for his originals. Bishop Mant, in his Ancient Hymns from the Roman Breviary (1837), did a little better, although not half-a-dozen hymns in that Breviary are unaltered from their primitive forms, and many are no older than the fifteenth or sixteenth century. Rev. Edward Caswall, an Oxford convert to the Church of Rome, naturally confined his Lyra Catholica (1849) to the Breviary hymns, supplementing those of Rome with some from Paris. The first collection published by Dr. Newman (Hymni Ecclesiae, Pars I., 1839) was confined to the Paris Breviary, but with the notice that they “had no equal claim to antiquity” with “the discarded collections of the ante-reform era.” But he claimed on rather slight ground that they “breathe an ancient spirit, and even where they are the work of one pen, are the joint and indivisible contribution of many ancient minds.” This is an opinion of the work of Santeul and Coffin in which neither Cardinal Newman nor the Gallican Church would agree to-day.

In fact, these English scholars, with their constant habit of making Latin verse after classic models from their school-days, and their entire want of familiarity with post-classic Latin, found what pleased them best in the two Breviaries of Rome and Paris. With that they seemed likely to stop. It was Dr. John Mason Neale (1851-58) who, among translators, first broke these bounds, went to the older sources, and introduced to English readers, both by his collections and his translations, the great hymns of the Western Church. As a translator he leaves much to be desired. His ideas as to faithful reproduction of the form of his originals are vague. His hymns too often might be said to be based on the Latin text rather than to reproduce it. But they are spirited poems, whose own vigor and beauty sent readers to the original, and they were not disappointed.

From that time we have had a series of excellent workers in this field—John Keble, Rev. W. J. Blew (1855), Mr. J. D. Chambers (1857 and 1866), Rev. J. W. Hewett (1859), Sir Henry Baker (1861 and 1868), Rev. Herbert Kynaston (1862), Rev. J. Trend (1862), Rev. P. S. Worsley (1863), Earl Nelson (1857 and 1868), Rev. Richard F. Littledale (1867), R. Campbell, of the Anglo-Catholic party; and Dean Stanley, Mrs. Charles (1858 and 1866) and Dr. Hamilton Magill (1876) outside its ranks. Theirs have been no inconsiderable part of those labors which have made the last thirty years the golden age of English hymn-writing, surpassing even the era of the Methodist revival.

In America the work was begun in 1840 with a modest little volume published at Auburn, in New York, and ascribed by Mr. Duffield to Dr. Henry Mills of Auburn Theological Seminary, who in 1856 also published a volume of translations of German hymns. His earlier book was The Hymn of Hildebert and the Ode of Xavier, with English Versions, and contained thirty-five duodecimo pages. Next in order came Dr. John Williams, Bishop of Connecticut, with Ancient Hymns of the Holy Church (1845). Dr. William R. Williams of New York, in his address on “The Conservative Principle in our Literature,” delivered in 1843, made a reference to the Dies Irae, which gave him the occasion to publish in an Appendix the literary history of the great hymn, giving the text along with Dr. Trench’s version and his own. This seems to have given the impulse which has made America so prolific in translations of that hymn, only Germany surpassing us in this respect. Dr. Abraham Coles may be said to have led off with his volume, containing thirteen translations in 1847. But it was not until after the war for the Union that the productive powers of American translators were brought into play. Much, no doubt, was due to foreign impulse, especially from Dr. Trench and Dr. Newman; but it is notable that in America far more work has been done outside than inside the Episcopalian communion.

Dr. Coles again in 1866, Mr. Duffield in 1867, Chancellor Benedict in 1869, Hon. N. B. Smithers in 1879 and 1881, and Mr. John L. Hayes in 1887 published volumes of translations. But far more numerous are the poets whose versions of Latin hymns have appeared in various periodicals or in collections like Professor CoppÉe’s Songs of Praise (1866), Dr. Schaff’s Christ in Song (1869), Odenheimer and Bird’s Songs of the Spirit (1871), Dr. H. C. Fish’s Heaven in Song (1874), Frank Foxcroft’s Resurgit (1879), and Dr. Schaff and Arthur Gilman’s Library of Sacred Poetry (1881 and 1886). Of these contributing poets we mention Dr. E. A. Washburn, whose translations have been collected in his posthumous volume, Voices from a Busy Life (1883); Dr. Ray Palmer, our chief sacred singer, whose versions of the O esca viatorum and the Jesu dulcis memoria are as classic as his “My faith looks up to Thee;” Dr. A. R. Thompson, to whom the present volume is under great obligations; Rev. J. Anketell, another of its benefactors; Rev. M. Woolsey Stryker, Rev. D. Y. Heisler, Rev. Franklin Johnson, D.D., and Rev. W. S. McKenzie, D.D. Besides these we may mention the anthology of translations published by the Rev. F. Wilson (1859), of texts by Professor F. A. March (1874 and 1883), and of both texts and translations by Judge C. C. Nott (1865 and subsequent years).

It is not, however, only as literature, but in the actual use of the American churches, that the Latin hymns have made a place for themselves. Since 1859, when the Andover professors published the Sabbath Hymn and Tune-Book, with original translations furnished by Dr. Ray Palmer, there has been a peaceful revolution in American hymnology. Every one of the larger denominations and many of the smaller have provided themselves with new hymn-books, in which the resources of English, foreign, and ancient hymnology have been employed freely, and with more exacting taste as to sense and form, than characterized the hymn-books of the era before the war. While the compilers have drawn freely upon Caswall, Neale, Chandler, and the Anglican Hymns Ancient and Modern (1861), in many cases original translations were given, as in Hymns of the Church for the (Dutch) Reformed Church, of which Dr. A. R. Thompson was one of the editors; and Dr. Charles Robinson’s Laudes Domini (1884), to which Mr. Duffield contributed. And there is evidence that the hymns thus brought into Church use from the storehouse of the earlier Christian ages have helped thoughtful Christians to realize more fully the great principle of the Communion of the saints—to realize that all the faithful of the present are bound in spiritual brotherhood with those who held to the same Head and walked in the light of the same faith in bygone centuries, even though it was with stumbling and amid shadows, from which our path by God’s good providence has been set free.