That in light wits affection loose did move,
But all these follies now I do reprove.
But two things had come over this idealist and courtly love-poetry by the end of the sixteenth century. It had become a literary artifice, a refining upon outworn and extravagant conceits, losing itself at times in the fantastic and absurd. A more important fact was that this poetry had begun to absorb a new warmth and spirit, not from Petrarch and mediaeval chivalry, but from classical love-poetry with its simpler, less metaphysical strain, its equally intense but more realistic description of passion, its radically different conception of the relation between the lovers and of the influence of love in a man's life. The courtly, idealistic strain was crossed by an Epicurean and sensuous one that tends to treat with scorn the worship of woman, and echoes again and again the Pagan cry, never heard in Dante or Petrarch, of the fleetingness of beauty and love:
Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus!
Soles occidere et redire possunt:
Nobis quum semel occidit brevis lux
Nox est perpetua una dormienda.
Vivez si m'en croyez, n'attendez à demain;
Cueillez dès aujourd'hui les roses de la vie.
Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,