The poetry with which the Christian Church had been instinct from the beginning, converges and is gathered up in the _Commedia_. The faith had early shown its poetical aspect. It is superfluous to dwell on this, for it is the charge against ancient teaching that it was too large and imaginative. It soon began to try rude essays in sculpture and mosaic: expressed its feeling of nature in verse and prose, rudely also, but often with originality and force; and opened a new vein of poetry in the thoughts, hopes, and aspirations of regenerate man. Modern poetry must go back, for many of its deepest and most powerful sources, to the writings of the Fathers, and their followers of the School. The Church further had a poetry of its own, besides the poetry of literature; it had the poetry of devotion--the Psalter chanted daily, in a new language and a new meaning; and that wonderful body of hymns, to which age after age had contributed its offering, from the Ambrosian hymns to the _Veni, Sancte Spiritus_ of a king of France, the _Pange lingua_ of Thomas Aquinas, the _Dies iræ_, and _Stabat Mater_, of the two Franciscan brethren, Thomas of Celano, and Jacopone.[94] The elements and fragments of poetry were everywhere in the Church--in her ideas of life, in her rules and institutions for passing through it, in her preparation for death, in her offices, ceremonial, celebrations, usages, her consecration of domestic, literary, commercial, civic, military, political life, the meanings and ends she had given them, the religious seriousness with which the forms of each were dignified--in her doctrine, and her dogmatic system--her dependence on the unseen world--her Bible. From each and all of these, and from that public feeling, which, if it expressed itself but abruptly and incoherently, was quite alive to the poetry which surrounded it, the poet received due impressions of greatness and beauty, of joy and dread. Then the poetry of Christian religion and Christian temper, hitherto dispersed, or manifested in act only, found its full and distinct utterance, not unworthy to rank in grandeur, in music, in sustained strength, with the last noble voices from expiring Heathenism. [Footnote 94: Trench, Sacred Latin Poetry, 1849.]