But rime was recognized slowly as a composing principle. Fortunatus[19] in the next century used it often enough, indeed, to show intention, but still incidentally. His famous hymn _Vexilla regis_, ignoring rime in its first quatrain, ends every line of the second with the same sound, and three of them with double rime.[20] Contemporary interest in meter appears in the poem replying to Gregory’s request for Sapphics.[21] Most of his many other graceful occasional poems are in elegiacs. One other hymn achieved a fame second only to that of the _Vexilla regis_, the _Pange, lingua, gloriosi_. These two great Passion hymns may be taken as typical of the transitional poetic of the time. They are at once old and new. Each is a veritable hymn, not adapted as were the selections from Prudentius, but composed in a popular measure for community singing. Turning back to them from their successors of the great medieval period, one almost inevitably renders them with the same strong stresses. So read, they seem not to lose, but to gain in emphasis and swing. Who shall prove that they were not so rendered in the poet’s own time? But who shall prove that they were? Against such rendering is clear evidence that Fortunatus controlled expertly the ancient quantitative prosody. For it are, first, the measures themselves, which come from popular verse accentual even in ancient Rome, and, second, a shift of speaking habit spreading slowly through the new Roman world. Both these must now be examined. C. THE EARLIER LATIN HYMNS[22] O lux beata Trinitas Et principalis Unitas, Iam sol recedit igneus; Infunde lumen cordibus. Te mane laudum carmine Te deprecamur vespere; Te nostra supplex gloria Per cuncta laudet sæcula.[23] Here is new poetry, and the beginning of a new poetic. Not graver than Boethius in rejecting decoration, not terser in rejecting dilation, it is more direct, more simply responsive. The communal expression, the imaginative answer of people united, is as distinct poetically from individual reflection as is the communal hope from pensive resignation. The hope that Boethius had, but did not express in his _Consolatio_, appears here as above all a communal inspiration. The hymns are popular essentially in being the poetry of a society, the kingdom of heaven. Often intensely lyric, they express typically in these earlier centuries the emotions of a community. Their poets, many of them soon forgotten, if ever known, without thought of individual fame sought to give voice to what all felt together. The wide and continued vogue of the early hymns testifies to the validity of their popular poetic.