Dost thou love Beauty? (And beauty worthy'st is to move) Poor cousened consener, _that_ she, and _that_ thou, Which did begin to love, are neither now; Next day repaires (but ill) last dayes decay. Nor are, (although the river keepe the name) Yesterdaies waters, and to-daies the same. _Of the Progresse of the Soule. The second Anniversarie_, 389-96. Donne believes firmly in man's potential greatness, and the power within his own soul: Seeke wee then our selves in our selves; for as Men force the Sunne with much more force to passe. By gathering his beames with a chrystall glasse; So wee, If wee into our selves will turne, Blowing our sparkes of virtue, may out-burne The straw, which doth about our hearts sojourne. _Letter to Mr Roland Woodward._ And although, in the _Progress of the Soul_, he failed to give expression to it, yet his belief in progress is unquenchable. He fully shares the mystic's view that "man, to get towards Him that's Infinite, must first be great" (_Letter to the Countess of Salisbury_). In his treatment of love, Donne's mystical attitude is most clearly seen. He holds the Platonic conception, that love concerns the soul only, and is independent of the body, or bodily presence; and he is the poet, who, at his best, expresses this idea in the most dignified and refined way. The reader feels not only that Donne believes it, but that he has in some measure experienced it; whereas with his imitators it degenerated into little more than a fashionable "conceit." The _Undertaking_ expresses the discovery he has made of this higher and deeper kind of love; and in the _Ecstasy_ he describes the union of the souls of two lovers in language which proves his familiarity with the description of ecstasy given by Plotinus (_Enn._ vi. 9, § 11). The great value of this spiritual love is that it is unaffected by time and space, a belief which is nowhere more exquisitely expressed than in the refrain of his little song, _Soul's Joy_.[29] O give no way to griefe, But let beliefe Of mutuall love, This wonder to the vulgar prove Our Bodyes, not wee move. In one of his verse letters to the Countess of Huntingdon[30] he explains how true love cannot be desire: 'Tis love, but with such fatall weaknesse made, That it destroyes it selfe with its owne shade. He goes still further in the poem entitled _Negative Love_, where he says that love is such a passion as can only be defined by negatives, for it is above apprehension, and his language here is closely akin to the description of the One or the Good given by Plotinus in the sixth Ennead.