Adam’s peculiarities are very marked in this production. He alludes, as you perceive, to the Cross in the air which Constantine took as his sign in which to conquer. He refers to Chosroes, King of Persia, who, after great successes and the conquest of Jerusalem itself, was finally overcome by Heraclius, the Eastern Emperor, about 622-29 A.D.; and he also drags in a piece of mystical imagery about the “four-squareness” of the earth, which is hard enough to understand without a key. The key is one with many wards. It includes the “breadth, depth, length, and height” of the love of Christ; it suggests the appearance of the heavenly city of John’s vision; it reminds us of the temple in Ezekiel’s prophecy, and of the account of the actual structure in 1 Kings; it recalls the classical geographers’ notions about the shape of the earth and about the “four quarters,” which we still call east, west, north, south; it finally symbolizes all these things by the four arms of the Cross! Is it any wonder that Adam of St. Victor is a difficult poet to translate, and that his verses are not fitted to be sung? Yet it must not be forgotten that the _Heri mundus exultavit_ (St. Stephen’s Day) and the _Veni, Creator Spiritus, Spiritus Recreator_, are both his. Nor must it escape notice that Dr. Neale’s _Mediaeval Hymns_ contains eleven versions of Adam of St. Victor; while Dr. Washburn, Chancellor Benedict, and other translators have quite made the old schoolman’s “sequences” and “proses” familiar to the most careless eye. Recently also we have the three volumes of Mr. Digby S. Wrangham (London, 1881) in which our poet is translated entire, the Latin and English being placed upon opposite pages. He has attained such an eminence as Drummond of Hawthornden, who has come back to us because he knew Ben Jonson and had kept and stratified the spirit of his age. To me the man is always fascinating, always suggestive. He appears to challenge the best that we moderns can do. His very terseness is a defiance. And here, in this strange symmetry, I fancy that I see the alertness and skill of that wise insect which takes hold with her hands in kings’ palaces. The web of this precise and unvarying artisan often sparkles with the morning dew of a pure devotion. The lines and stays and braces and fashioning of these illustrious verses are as accurate as the spider’s spinning. I look up toward the light and, yonder, upon some Corinthian capital of the song of songs—or over there in a corner of the gate called Beautiful through which Ezekiel walks—or again, high amid the wisdom of that Solomon’s Porch of the Apocalypse where stands the serene John—there I see how Adam of St. Victor has stretched his web. And if, now and then, some dead fly of an obscure allusion, or some desiccated bit of monasticism, offends the sight, I strive to think only of the art that has spread the fabric—and God’s glorious sunshine brightens, upon His own temple, His little creature’s toil!