language is in hymns, it can claim no preëminence or priority in the devotional lyric. There were hymns before there were hieroglyphics. Historically, the human race was up and singing before sunrise. Literature itself first appears coming up out of the old forests with priestly chants. Practically every literature seems to have had its beginning in hymnic song and chant. The first piece of French writing extant, except for a bit of tabulation, the "Sentiments de Strasbourg," is a hymn. Charlemagne, like Ambrose and Gregory and Alfred the Great, established schools for the teaching of hymn singing. The first trace of Greek literature is hymnic. The story of Tyrtæus, whether one reads it as myth or fact, gives a glimpse of the early Grecian hymn, and its lyric power to awaken and transfigure popular sentiment. The Athenians, bidden by the oracle to send a leader to the Spartans, sent in guile, as the one man of Athens likely to be of least service to the rival city, Tyrtæus, a crippled school-teacher. But their guile misled them: the crippled school-teacher taught the Spartans and their children hymns of the gods and songs of human duty and destiny which so filled their minds with just ideas and fired their souls with brave and noble purpose as to reform the state of Sparta. The type reached a marvelous state of perfection early in the life of the Hebrew people. Their greatest artistic expression was their lyrics of religion. And they sang them with a will. The hymn singing of Mount Zion could be heard twelve miles away.

Their collections of psalms, begun in their early recorded life, enjoy to-day an enormous popular favor even translated into modern languages, and they have been an incalculably powerful influence in forming the taste and ideals of the Western nations. "With a psalm," says Prothero, in his "Psalms in Human Life," "we are baptized, married, and buried." In this connection he quotes Heine as saying that in the Book of Psalms are collected the sunrise and sunset, birth and death, promise and fulfillment-the whole drama of humanity." These early hymns have strangely permeated European civilized life since Christianity brought them into Europe. To-day the English-speaking school-boy who does not know by heart some of this ancient hymnic poetry is rightly considered ignorant and neglected.

The early Christian centuries echo with Greek and Latin hymns. Medieval literature comes to its flower in its religious songs. Some of them are vigorously alive to-day. The "Dies Ira" is an example; Philip Schaff thought it beyond doubt the greatest song in the world. Lockhart says that Sir Walter Scott was murmuring its lines as he lay dying. Dr. Samuel Johnson could never repeat it, Mrs. Thrale says, without tears. This medieval hymn has been published, up to 1910, in more than 137 modern English translations. Few other productions of the Latin language have seen so many published English renderings.

If hymnody flourished in medieval Latin, it has

found even more genial and fertile soil in the Teutonic languages. The German hymn is a form of poetry deeply rooted in popular favor, noble in its aim, and soundly artistic within its scope.

It is true that only in late years has the indigenous religious lyric reached the established place in English poetry that it holds in the German, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew literatures. It had to struggle against the strongly intrenched "Psalms in Meter" and to overcome some very strong and peculiar prejudices before it came fully to its own. Yet from the time that English literature, like most other literatures, opens its story with a hymn, the type of poem has held its place and performed its incalculably useful service in English life and literature.

A book of hymns issued in 1549, and revised and added to, saw by 1828 more than six hundred editions. This book, entitled originally "Certayne Psalms chosen out of the Ebrewe by Thomas Sternhold," later known as "Sternhold and Hopkins," far surpassed in circulation all other English books except the Bible and the Prayer-Book. The translation, made conjointly by thirty American scholars, of the Psalms from Hebrew into verse-"The Bay Psalm Book," Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1640was reprinted in 1647 and saw at least twenty printings in England and six in Scotland. These hymns, however, were translations. As has been said, English literature was late in producing its own indigenous hymnody. The English people were long content with Latin hymns and the various

translations of the Hebrew hymnody. But since the eighteenth century the writing and appreciation of hymns has grown till the type has become more and more an element of our poetic wealth. Its recognition as a province of the great poetry of the language was for natural reasons slow in coming; but it has come.

Yet to call the hymn poetry is to many minds a new and bold assumption. That this expression of the human spirit has no right to the name of literature is a judgment not confined entirely to persons of a light way of thinking. Certain graver critics, even as they point out that the crowning glory of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was their great, surging hymns, seem to be unaware of the rich strain of religious lyrical poetry in our literature to-day. There is an inclination to fence in what is called "literary lyrics" as if to fence out "singing lyrics." Now there is, of course, a distinction be tween poems meant to be sung and poems written in the pattern of lyrical poetry but never meant to be sung; but the terminology which classes one kind as literary, thereby implying that the other kind is not of the realm of literature, is inaccurate and unhappy. There may be no objection to saying that lyric poetry not meant to be sung is literature, but objection there is to saying that verses meant to be sung-the true lyrics of the language-are not literature. The religious lyric belongs to the province of poetry none the less because it sets itself to music and is taken up and sung by most of the people.

The literature of the people is not an alien thing, apart from them; it is of course expressed at first by a few elect spokesmen, but after all it is of and for the many. It cannot be deemed estranged and aloof. If to be literary is to be cabined, cribbed, apart from the common mind and heart of the age, the hymn is not literary. But literature is not thus penned up away from the people. It springs forth from the general consciousness as a spring of water issues from the hillside. And it is assigned to its place by the social mind. A single wave of popular favor will not and should not establish any form of expression as literature; but a general and continuous acceptance will establish it. A general and continuous acceptance the hymn has had. True, the fact may indicate to some persons nothing more than an innate religiosity in the Anglo-Saxon mind. However that may be, and however we may limit the term "literature," the English-speaking people do produce largely, read widely, and love profoundly a form of expression called the hymn. If the form does in one way or another sing itself into the consciousness of most people, it may justly be termed lyrical. And if, expressing grave and noble sentiment in a style of marked chasteness and decorum, it is gratifying to the people generally at their more earnest and most elevated moments, there is little gain in arguing that it is not literature.

Still there remains something of a critical tradition that while the hymn in Greek, Latin, and German is excellent poetry, it is in English a poor and