I fondly remember singing from the St. Gregory hymnal in grade school. Looking down from the choir loft in the back of the church and standing five feet from the shouting organ pipes that stretched from floor to ceiling leaves a glorious impression on a ten year old!

My skill in Latin consists of two years in high school over fifty years ago. I remember most of the pronunciation, but the precise meanings and poetic meter is lost on me. I have carefully compared the printed text with the transcription, but poetic structure may be incorrect.

My primary goal is to provide a source for singers and musicians who love the old Latin hymns, as I do. I hope this will help spread the joy provided by these "Oldies, but goodies." All the text of the lyrics and other material have been transcribed to this document for research and indexing. If you can only remember a few words of a hymn, a simple search should find the full text.

The Word and PDF version closely approximate the original page layout.

The HTML version provides the original images of the pages suitable for printing and immediate use. Contrary to the usual Gutenberg guidelines, the page numbers are left to provide easy reference to the original pages.

The page images are stored as 1100 X 1600 GIF files to minimize file size and preserve fidelity. On my computer a single sheet page fills an 8.5 by 11 inch sheet by setting the print scaling factor to 75%. A scaling factor of 40% produces a page the size of the original book (4.3 X 6.0 inches). Some files are both facing pages because they are read and sung using both pages. These print in the original size at 40% scaling in either portrait or landscape format. "Your results may vary."

Where works span several pages, the text is rendered without interruption and all the included pages are listed at the end of the work to provide a search target.

The image files are named for easy access. N145P226.gif is the first page (226) of hymn number 145. N145P227.gif is the second page (227) of hymn number 145.

A description of the header of each item is shown in this example:

Hymn number: No.1

Occasion or ADVENT
Theme:

Title: Hark! A Mystic Voice is Sounding
En clara vox

Origin and Tr. Rev. E. Caswall
other notes: Nicola A. Montani

[End Transcriber's notes]