Adam’s poems are still on the shelves of most Parisian bookshops, as common as “Aucassins” and better known than much poetry of our own time; for the mediaeval Latin rhymes have a delightful sonority and simplicity that keep them popular because they were not made to be read but to be sung.  One does not forget their swing:—­

Infinitus et Immensus;

or—­

Oh, juvamen oppressorum;

or—­

Consolatrix miserorum
 Suscitatrix mortuorum.

The organ rolls through them as solemnly as ever it did in the Abbey Church; but in mediaeval art so much more depends on the mass than on the measure—­on the dignity than on the detail—­that equivalents are impossible.  Even Walter Scott was content to translate only three verses of the “Dies Irae.”  At best, Viollet-le-Duc could reproduce only a sort of modern Gothic; a more or less effaced or affected echo of a lost emotion which the world never felt but once and never could feel again.  Adam composed a number of hymns to the Virgin, and, in them all, the feeling counts for more, by far, than the sense.  Supposing we choose the simplest and try to give it a modern version, aiming to show, by comparison, the difference of sound; one can perhaps manage to recover a little of the simplicity, but give it the grand style one cannot; or, at least, if any one has ever done both, it is Walter Scott, and merely by placing side by side the “Dies Irae” and his translation of it, one can see at a glance where he was obliged to sacrifice simplicity only to obtain sound:—­

Dies irae, dies illa,
 Solvet seclum in favilla,
 Teste David cum Sibylla.

Quantus tremor est futurus,
 Quando judex est venturus,
 Cuncta stride discussurus!

Tuba mirum spargens sonum
 Per sepulchra regionum,
 Coget omnes ante thronum.

That day of wrath, that dreadful day,
 When heaven and earth shall pass away,
 What power shall be the sinner’s stay? 
 How shall he meet that dreadful day?

When shrivelling like a parched scroll
 The flaming heavens together roll;
 When louder yet and yet more dread
 Swells the high trump that wakes the dead.

As translation the last line is artificial.

The “Dies Irae” does not belong, in spirit, to the twelfth century; it is sombre and gloomy like the Last Judgments on the thirteenth-century portals; it does not love.  Adam loved.  His verses express the Virgin; they are graceful, tender, fervent, and they hold the same dignity which cannot be translated:—­

In hac valle lacrimarum
 Nihil dulce, nihil carum,
 Suspecta sunt omnia;
 Quid hic nobis erit tutum,
 Cum nec ipsa vel virtutum
 Tuta sit victoria!

Caro nobis adversatur,
 Mundus cami suffragatur
 In nostram perniciem;
 Hostis instat, nos infestans,
 Nunc se palam manifestans,
 Nunc occultans rabiem.