Senza alcuna dimura.
Lo cor adempito
Dagiamoli fornito
Senza odio ne rancura."[16]{14}

|42| There have been few more rapturous poets than Jacopone; men deemed
him mad; but, "if he is mad," says a modern Italian writer, "he is mad as
the lark"--"Nessun poeta canta a tutta gola come questo frate minore. S'
e pazzo, e pazzo come l' allodola."

To him is attributed that most poignant of Latin hymns, the "Stabat Mater
dolorosa"; he wrote also a joyous Christmas pendant to it:--

"Stabat Mater speciosa,
Juxta foenum gaudiosa,
Dum jacebat parvulus.
Cujus animam gaudentem,
Laetabundam ac ferventem,
Pertransivit jubilus."[17]{15}

In the fourteenth century we find a blossoming forth of Christmas poetry
in another land, Germany.{16} There are indeed Christmas and Epiphany
passages in a poetical Life of Christ by Otfrid of Weissenburg in the
ninth century, and a twelfth-century poem by Spervogel, "Er ist gewaltic
unde starc," opens with a mention of Christmas, but these are of little
importance for us. The fourteenth century shows the first real outburst,
and that is traceable, in part at least, to the mystical movement in the
Rhineland caused by the preaching of the great Dominican, Eckhart of
Strasburg, and his followers. It was a movement towards inward piety as
distinguished from, though not excluding, external observances, which
made its way largely by sermons listened to by great congregations in the
towns. Its impulse came not from the monasteries proper, but from the
convents of Dominican friars, and it was for Germany in the fourteenth
century something like what Franciscanism had been for Italy in the
thirteenth. One of the central doctrines of the school |43| was that of
the Divine Birth in the soul of the believer; according to Eckhart the
soul comes into immediate union with God by "bringing forth the Son"
within itself; the historic Christ is the symbol of the divine humanity
to which the soul should rise: "when the soul bringeth forth the Son," he
says, "it is happier than Mary."{17} Several Christmas sermons by
Eckhart have been preserved; one of them ends with the prayer, "To this
Birth may that God, who to-day is new born as man, bring us, that we,
poor children of earth, may be born in Him as God; to this may He bring
us eternally! Amen."{18} With this profound doctrine of the Divine
Birth, it was natural that the German mystics should enter deeply into
the festi