It was only the force of Donne's personality that could achieve even an approximate harmony of elements so divergent as are united in his love-verses, that could master the lower-natured steed that drew the chariot of his troubled and passionate soul and make it subservient to his yoke-fellow of purer strain who is a lover of honour, and modesty, and temperance, and the follower of true glory. In the work of his followers, who were many, though they owed allegiance to Jonson also, the lower elements predominated. The strain of metaphysical love-poetry in the seventeenth century with its splendid élan and sonorous cadence is in general Epicurean and witty. It is only now and again—in Marvell, perhaps in Herrick's
Bid me to live, and I will live,
Thy Protestant to be,
certainly in Rochester's songs, in
An age in her embraces past
Would seem a winter's day,
or the unequalled:
When wearied with a world of woe
To thy safe bosom I retire,
Where love, and peace, and truth does flow,