In exactly the same mood as _The Primrose_ is _The Blossome_, possibly written in the same place and on the same day, for the poet is preparing to return to London. _The Dampe_ is in an even more scornful tone, and one hesitates to connect it with Mrs. Herbert. But all these poems recur so repeatedly together in the manuscripts as to suggest that they have a common origin. And with them go the beautiful poems _The Funerall_ and _The Relique_. In the former the cruelty of the lady has killed her lover, but in the second the tone changes entirely, the relation between Donne and Mrs. Herbert (note the lines Thou shalt be a Mary _Magdalen_ and I A something else thereby) has ceased to be Petrarchian and become Platonic, their love a thing pure and of the spirit, but none the less passionate for that: First, we lov'd well and faithfully, Yet knew not what wee lov'd, nor why, Difference of sex no more wee knew, Then our Guardian Angells doe; Comming and going, wee Perchance might kisse, but not between those meales; Our hands ne'r toucht the seales, Which nature, injur'd by late law, sets free: These miracles wee did; but now alas, All measure, and all language, I should passe, Should I tell what a miracle shee was. Such were the notes that a poet in the seventeenth century might still sing to a high-born lady his patroness and his friend. No one who knows the fashion of the day will read into them more than they were intended to convey. No one who knows human nature will read them as merely frigid and conventional compliments. Any uncertainty one may feel about the subject arises not from their being love-poems, but from the difficulty which Donne has in adjusting himself to the Petrarchian convention, the tendency of his passionate heart and satiric wit to break through the prescribed tone of worship and complaint. Without some touch of passion, some vibration of the heart, Donne is only too apt to accumulate 'monstrous and disgusting hyperboles'. This is very obvious in the _Epicedes_--his complimentary laments for the young Lord Harington, Miss Boulstred, Lady Markham, Elizabeth Drury and the Marquis of Hamilton, poems in which it is difficult to find a line that moves. Indeed, seventeenth-century elegies are not as a rule pathetic. A poem in the simple, piercing strain and the Wordsworthian plainness of style of the Dutch poet Vondel's lament for his little daughter is hardly to be found in English. An occasional epitaph like Browne's May! be thou never grac'd with birds that sing, Nor Flora's pride! In thee all flowers and roses spring, Mine only died,