It would be possible, indeed, to illustrate a complete dissertation on the methods of expression in serious poetry from the fifty-one lines of the _Dies Irae_. Rhyme, alliteration, cadence, and adjustment of vowel and consonant values,--all these things receive perfect expression in it, or, at least, in the first thirteen stanzas, for the last four are a little inferior. It is quite astonishing to reflect upon the careful art or the felicitous accident of such a line as "Tuba mirum spargens sonum," with the thud of the trochee[9] falling in each instance in a different vowel; and still more on the continuous sequence of five stanzas, from _Judex ergo_ to _non sit cassus_, in which not a word could be displaced or replaced by another without loss. The climax of verbal harmony, corresponding to and expressing religious passion and religious awe, is reached in the last-- "Quaerens me sedisti lassus, Redemisti crucem passus: Tantus labor non sit cassus!"-- where the sudden change from the dominant _e_ sounds (except in the rhyme foot) of the first two lines to the _a_'s of the last is simply miraculous, and miraculously assisted by what may be called the internal sub-rhyme of _sedisti_ and _redemisti_. This latter effect can rarely be attempted without a jingle: there is no jingle here, only an ineffable melody. After the _Dies Irae_, no poet could say that any effect of poetry was, as far as sound goes, unattainable, though few could have hoped to equal it, and perhaps no one except Dante and Shakespeare has fully done so. [Footnote 9: Of course no one of the four is a pure classical trochee; but all obey the trochaic _rhythm_.] Beside the grace and the grandeur, the passion and the art, of this wonderful composition, even the best remaining examples of mediaeval hymn-writing may look a little pale. It is possible for criticism, which is not hypercriticism, to object to the pathos of the _Stabat_, that it is a trifle luscious, to find fault with the rhyme-scheme of _Jesu dulcis memoria_, that it is a little faint and frittered; while, of course, those who do not like conceits and far-fetched interpretations can always quarrel with the substance of Adam of St Victor. But those who care for merits rather than for defects will never be weary of admiring the best of these hymns, or of noticing and, as far as possible, understanding their perfection. Although the language they use is old, and their subjects are those which very competent and not at all irreligious critics have denounced as unfavourable to poetry, the special poetical charm, as we conceive it in modern days, is not merely present in them, but is present in a manner of which few traces can be found in classical times. And some such students, at least, will probably go on to examine the details of the hymn-writers' method, with the result of finding more such things as have been pointed out above. [Sidenote: _The rhythm of Bernard._]