But is it true that we desire to find her? Donne's answer is _Woman's Constancy_: Now thou hast lov'd me one whole day, To-morrow when thou leav'st what wilt thou say? She will, like Proteus in the _Two Gentlemen of Verona_, have no dearth of sophistries--but why elaborate them? Vain lunatique, against these scapes I could Dispute, and conquer, if I would, Which I abstaine to doe, For by to-morrow, I may think so too. Why ask for constancy when change is the life and law of love? I can love both fair and brown; Her whom abundance melts, and her whom want betrays; Her who loves loneness best, and her who masks and plays. . . . . . . . I can love her and her, and you and you, I can love any so she be not true. It is not often that the reckless and wilful gaiety of youth masking as cynicism has been expressed with such ebullient wit as in these and companion songs. And when he adopts for a time the pose of the faithful lover bewailing the cruelty of his mistress the sarcastic wit is no less fertile. It would be difficult to find in the language a more sustained succession of witty surprises than _The Will_. Others were to catch these notes from Donne, and Suckling later flutes them gaily in his lighter fashion, never with the same fullness of wit and fancy, never with the same ardour of passion divinable through the audacious extravagances. But to amuse was by no means the sole aim of Donne's 'wit'; gay humour touched with fancy and feeling is not its only quality. Donne's 'wit' has many strands, his humour many moods, and before considering how these are woven together into an effect that is entirely poetical, we may note one or two of the soberer strands which run through his _Letters_, _Epicedes_, and similar poems--descriptive, reflective, and complimentary. Not much of Donne's poetry is given to description. Of the feeling for nature of the Elizabethans, their pastoral and ideal pictures of meadow and wood and stream, which delighted the heart of Izaak Walton, there is nothing in Donne. A greater contrast than that between Marlowe's _Come live with me_ and Donne's imitation _The Baite_ it would be hard to conceive. But in _The Storme_ and _The Calme_ Donne used his wit to achieve an effect of realism which was something new in English poetry, and was not reproduced till Swift wrote _The City Shower_. From the first lines, which describe how The South and West winds join'd, and as they blew, Waves like a rolling trench before them threw, to the close of _The Storme_ the noise of the contending elements is deafening: