4. _kodex_, manuscript in text hand on parchment, usually containing
some portion of Scripture or of classic literature.
19-20. By conserving classic learning the monks during medieval times
nurtured the seeds of culture from which was to spring the Reformation
of the Church and its concomitant, the civilization of the modern age.
Cf. lines 14-16.
24. _Platos himmel och Perikles' republik_.--What the poet here refers
to as "Plato's heaven" may be briefly defined as the ideal world (as
conceived in his philosophy), dominated by the highest of all ideas,
that of absolute good. But the ideal good in Plato's philosophy did not
mean a personal God, hence a purely religious conception of heaven was
not a part of his system.
Pericles, though himself of aristocratic birth, was the protagonist of
democracy in Greece, in opposition to Cimon, who through his influence
was exiled 460 B.C. The republic subsequently established by Pericles
was in fact, according to the contemporary historian Thucydides, an
autocracy by common consent.---The line has reference to the activity of
the learned friars, especially of the Renaissance period, in
reduplicating copies of the remnants of the old Greek literature,
thereby saving to the world the _knowledge_ of Greek thought and Greek
institutions.
30-32. The closing lines present, as does the poem as a whole, a picture
of the entire period known as the Middle Ages.