That neither of these additions at the beginning and end are parts of the original sequence, will be evident to any one who feels the terseness and power of the original. They are feeble, lumbering excrescences, and are fastened to it in such an external way as to destroy the unity of the poem, if left as they stand. The text in the Missal gives us a new conception of the powers of the Latin tongue. Its wonderful wedding of sense to sound—the _u_ assonance in the second stanza, the _o_ assonance in the third, and the _a_ and _i_ assonances in the fourth, for instance—the sense of organ music that runs through the hymn, even unaccompanied, as distinctly as through the opening verses of Lowell’s “Vision of Sir Launfal,” and the transitions as clearly marked in sound as in meaning from lofty adoration to pathetic entreaty, impart a grandeur and dignity to the _Dies Irae_ which are unique in this kind of writing. Then the wonderful adaptation of the triple-rhyme to the theme—like blow following blow of hammer upon anvil, as Daniel says—impresses every reader. But to all this the supplementary verses add nothing. Of the use of the hymn in literature I have spoken already. Sir Walter Scott introduces a vigorous and characteristic version of a portion into his “Lay of the Last Minstrel” (1805). Lockhart, writing of the great Wizard’s death-bed, says of his unconscious and wandering utterances: “Whatever we could follow him in was some fragment of the Bible, or some petition of the Litany, or a verse of some psalm in the old Scotch metrical version, or some of the magnificent hymns of the Romish ritual. We very often heard distinctly the cadence of the _Dies Irae_.” So the Earl of Roscommon, in the previous century, died repeating his own version of the seventeenth stanza: “Prostrate, my contrite heart I rend; My God, my Father, and my Friend, Do not forsake me in my end!” Dr. Samuel Johnson never could repeat the tenth stanza without being moved to tears—the stanza Dean Stanley quotes in his description of Jacob’s Well. Goethe makes Gretchen in “Faust” faint with dismay and horror as she hears it sung in the cathedral, and from that moment of salutary pain she becomes another woman. Meinhold in his “Amber-Witch” (_Die Bernsteinhexe_), represents the very same verses as bringing comfort and assurance to a more stainless heroine in the hour of her sorest distress. Carlyle shows us the Romanticist tragedian Werner quoting the eighth stanza in his strange “last testament,” as his reason for having written neither a defence nor an accusation of his life: “With trembling I reflect that I myself shall first learn in its whole terrific compass what I properly was, when these lines shall be read by men; that is to say, in a point of time which for me will be no time; in a condition in which all experience will for me be too late: ‘Rex tremendae majestatis, Qui salvandos salvas gratis, Salva me, fons pietatis!!!’”