“Just so base, sublunary lovers’ hearts Fed on loose profane desires, May for an eye Or face comply: But those remov’d, they will as soon depart, And show their art, And painted fires. “Whilst I by pow’rful love, so much refin’d, That my absent soul the same is, Careless to miss A glance or kiss, Can with these elements of lust and sense Freely dispense, And court the mind.” In the examples thus far given, the character of the passion as shared by lover and beloved has been merely described. There was an attempt made in some of this poetry to define love as if it were a something to be analyzed—a product, as it were, of psychological elaboration. Vaughan has indicated the two traits in the love lyrist of the seventeenth century, when he gives the following title to a lyric,—“To Amoret, of the Difference ’Twixt Him and Other Lovers, and What True Love Is.” In defining “What True Love Is,” the poets show that it cannot be desire, but is rather an essence pure in itself, and in one instance it is described as something unknowable either to sense or to mind. Donne has left a letter in verse “To the Countess of Huntingdon,” in which he carefully explains how love cannot be desire. Sighing and moaning may be love, but it is love made in a weak way; love should never cast one down, but should elevate. “I cannot feel the tempest of a frown; I may be raised by love, but not thrown down; Though I can pity those sigh twice a day, I hate that thing whispers itself away. Yet since all love is fever, who to trees Doth talk, doth yet in love’s cold ague freeze. ’Tis love, but with such fatal weakness made, That it destroys itself with its own shade.” (ll. 27–34.) At first love was mere desire, ignorant of its object; but now love is a matter of the soul, and it is profane to call rages of passion love. “As all things were one nothing, dull and weak, Until this raw disorder’d heap did break, And several desires led parts away, Water declined with earth, the air did stay, Fire rose, and each from other but untied, Themselves unprison’d were and purified; So was love, first in vast confusion hid, An unripe willingness which nothing did, A thirst, an appetite which had no ease, That found a want, but knew not what would please. What pretty innocence in those days moved! Man ignorantly walk’d by her he loved; Both sigh’d and interchanged a speaking eye; Both trembled and were sick: both knew not why.” (ll. 37–51.)