The only arguments that are employed to prove that Robert was the author are very weak. The _first_ is that there was no sufficient competitor. But surely Hermannus Contractus is now a competitor of real merit and importance. Then, too, the king was a kind of religious pet, and such persons receive more than their due. But the _second_ argument is weaker still. It amounts in brief to the harmony displayed in the poem between the king’s life and his lovely verses. It strikes one, however, that an invalid like Hermann might have had fully as deep a religious experience as any such king. Moreover—and this is a vital fact—the _Veni Sancte_ is found in the _German_ hymnaries almost exclusively. This point was insisted upon in the controversy about the _Veni, Creator_; and Charles the Great in this respect had the advantage over Gregory the Great, until the claim of Rabanus Maurus, another German, was thoroughly examined. But among all the sources carefully edited by Kehrein from Daniel, Mone, and elsewhere, the French collections do not present themselves. On the contrary, in this elaborate list we find St. Gall, Kreuzlingen, Freiburg, Karlsruhe, Mainz, Ebersberg, Rome (1481), Venice (1497), with later examples printed at Cologne, Prague, Eichstettin, Lubeck, and Basel. Brander also found the hymn in the earliest codices of the three great neighboring cloisters of St. Gall, Einsiedeln, and Reichenau. Meanwhile the only notice of it in France comes from the Paris Breviary, which is of recent date. There is but one consideration further. I trust that I have established the perfect possibility that Hermannus Contractus might have been the author equally as well as Robert. The men lived in the same period to which, on the testimony of the best critics, the hymn is considered to belong. They were alike in possibilities of Christian experience and of musical and poetical temperament. But here they begin to diverge; and the preference is decidedly in favor of Hermann, whose hymn is found in the three oldest codices of his own neighborhood; of St. Gall, where he studied; of Einsiedeln, where it is possible that he was a resident; and of Reichenau, where he certainly lived from the age of thirty until his death. He could scarcely have gone about very much in his helpless and crippled condition; and these three conventual establishments are within a moderate distance of each other. From his seventh year he was to be discovered always somewhere in that vicinity, and the historians of St. Gall and of Reichenau positively claim the _Veni Sancte_ as his.