But the newness of the verse is at best less significant than the newness of the poetry. A jaded world has been refreshed by new imaginative expression. Bede’s exhibition of Christian poetry is not merely pious; nor is it either timid or complacent. He is convinced of a new Latin poetry. As Augustine redeemed rhetoric, so Ambrose transformed poetic, by new motives. The tender image of the Holy Innocents playing with their palms and crowns[48] is neither old nor new; it is the timeless language of individual lyric. But the habitual conceptions of Prudentius and Ambrose, of Hilary and Gregory, are not individual; they are communal. The lyric of the hymns exalts the common emotions of common observance. It is the poetry of aspirations shared not only with all Christians everywhere, but with immediate companions turning work into worship. It expresses the visions of a fellowship. No exception is found in the early hymns commemorating martyrs. The triumph is not personal. The individual heroism passes into the common hope of released energy and of the triumph of the kingdom of God. As early churches were built over the tombs of martyrs, and later additions made the nave look both down to the original _confessione_ and up to the high altar, so the martyr hymns express both a common gratitude and a common devotion. So a hundred images of light, suggestions of dawn, noon, stars, the ordinary lamp, the candle in church, lead not to individual emotion, but to the poetry of theology. In every light is the light of the world. The night-light (_vigil lucerna_) leads up to the giver of light, the creative fire (_Ignis creator igneus, Lumen donator luminis_).[49] Poetry discerns a new earth because of a new heaven, and finds both one. The poets of the hymns do not, as the Stoics, look down on the material world; they look through it. They neither belittle physical reality nor bow to it; they go on from it. Life in the hymns is not an urgent present and a visioned future; it is all one. The frame of the Christian year opens in the hymns on eternity. Eternal life begins now, and is not survival, but progressive release of human energy by God. Thus the Incarnation is revealed by Prudentius not in versified theology, but in poetic truth. It becomes a cosmic vision. Though this conception was widespread through the Prudentian hymn _Corde natus_,[50] and though Prudentius was quite as much philosopher as poet, literary influences are insufficient to account for the consistent continuity of the hymns as thought. Even Fortunatus, who certainly was no philosopher, was uplifted by common visions. The single line _Hymnum dicat turba fratrum_[51] might be taken as a formula for the poetic of the early hymns. Hilary discerned also the communal appeal of the symbolism of the Old Testament, as Ambrose had discerned a communal verse; but though the hymns owe much to individuals, the character of their lyric grows from unifying communal conceptions of life. FOOTNOTES: