It may be that Donne has not entirely succeeded in what he here attempts. There hangs about the poem just a suspicion of the conventional and unreal Platonism of the seventeenth century. In attempting to state and vindicate the relation of soul and body he falls perhaps inevitably into the appearance, at any rate, of the dualism which he is trying to transcend. He places them over against each other as separate entities and the lower bulks unduly. In love, says Pascal, the body disappears from sight in the intellectual and spiritual passion which it has kindled. That is what happens in _The Anniversarie_, not altogether in _The Extasie_. Yet no poem makes one realize more fully what Jonson meant by calling Donne 'the first poet in the world for some things'. 'I should never find any fault with metaphysical poems,' is Coleridge's judgement, 'if they were all like this or but half as excellent.' 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, May I contented there expire, that the accents of the _heart_ are clearly audible, that passion prevails over Epicurean fancy or cynical wit. On the other hand, the idealism of seventeenth-century poetry and romances, the Platonism of the Hôtel de Rambouillet that one finds in Habington's _Castara_, in Kenelm Digby's _Private Memoirs_, in the French romances of chivalry and their imitations in English is the silliest, because the emptiest, that ever masqueraded as such in any literature, at any period. A sensual and cynical flippancy on the one hand, a passionless, mannered idealism on the other, led directly to that thinly veiled contempt of women which is so obvious in the satirical essays of Addison and Pope's _Rape of the Lock_.