its time. It is not however distinguished for originality of thought or excellence of technique.
Mathias et Barnabas, Timotheus, Apollo
Silvanus, Titus, Theophilus, Gaius
is not a good couplet, but
Te iam portus habet: nos adhuc iactat abyssus:
Te lux vera tenet: nos tenebrae retinent:
Tu cum virginibus comitans, quocunque eat Agnus
Lilia cum violis colligis atque rosas
are better lines, and typical of what has been praised in the poem.
Opinion is still unsettled as to whether Agius and a writer known as Poeta Saxo are identical. Agius would not gain greatly were his claim established: the poem is nothing but a versification of prose sources (Annals and Einhard) on the life of Charlemagne.
The community of St Gall, as may be guessed from the frequent mention of it in these pages, has a wonderful record for the preservation of ancient literature. It is scarcely less remarkable for its own literary productions. Two of its writers shall have special notice now.
The first is Notker Balbulus, the Stammerer (840-912). Several other Notkers of St Gall followed him, the most famous of whom was Notker Labeo († 1022), translator into German of Boethius and much else. But this first Notker is considerably more important, principally on two grounds. One was the development of a form of church poetry known as the Sequence. The essence of it was this. It had become the fashion to prolong to an exaggerated extent the singing of the word Alleluia where it occurred at the end of antiphons. The melodies of such Alleluias were fixed, but were exceedingly hard to remember. Taking the hint from a Jumièges service-book that had been brought to St Gall, Notker fitted the Alleluias with words appropriate to the Church season or feast, putting as a rule a syllable to each note of the long wandering melody. Thus there grew up a new form of poem, non-metrical at the outset, which in later years became bound by stricter rules, and which exercised a great influence upon secular poetry. In Notker's hands it was wholly conditioned by the tune to which it was set. The one example of it that is widely known in this country is the funeral sequence, Media in vita, "In the midst of life," whether that is truly Notker's work or not.
He is also famous as the author of the book of reminiscences of Charlemagne called Gesta Karoli and long current simply as the work of the "Monk of St Gall." It is now recognised as Notker's. Alas! we possess only a part of it, but what we have is one of the few books of the period which can really be read with pleasure. There is not much plan in it; it is in the main Notker's recollections of stories told to him in his youth by an old warrior Adalbert who had fought for the Emperor, and by Adalbert's son Werinbert, a cleric, and also by a third informant
