The atmosphere in which the metaphysical treatment of love flourished was intensely intellectual. The poets in whom the strain is clearest were trying to accomplish two thing: they wished to oppose the idea of passion in love, and they endeavored to account for the attraction of sex in the love which they themselves experienced. However much these poets wished to exclude the notion of sex, their minds were constantly busied in trying to solve the source of its power. In Donne, the greatest representative of the metaphysical manner, this purpose is very evident. He wrote his longest poem, “An Anatomy of the World,” to show how, by reason of the death of a certain young woman, “the frailty and the decay of this whole world is represented.” In reply to Jonson’s criticism, that this poem was “full of blasphemies,” Donne remarked that “he described the Idea of a Woman, and not as she was.”[21] Here lies the secret of Donne’s treatment of woman; he was interested in her, not as a personality, but as an idea. In solving the nature of this idea he recurred to certain Platonic conceptions by which he thought to explain the source of her power. These Platonic conceptions are two. Woman is identified with virtue; she is the source of all virtue in the world, others being virtuous only by participating in her virtue. Thus in a letter “To the Countess of Huntingdon” he shows how virtue has been raised from her fallen state on earth by appearing in woman. She was once scattered among men, but now summed up in one woman. “If the world’s age and death be argued well By the sun’s fall, which now towards earth doth bend, Then we might fear that virtue, since she fell So low as woman, should be near her end. “But she’s not stoop’d, but raised; exiled by men She fled to heaven, that’s heavenly things, that’s you; She was in all men thinly scatter’d then, But now a mass contracted in a few. “She gilded us, but you are gold; and she Informed us, but transubstantiates you. Soft dispositions, which ductile be, Elixirlike, she makes not clean, but new. “Though you a wife’s and mother’s name retain, ’Tis not as woman, for all are not so; But virtue, having made you virtue, is fain To adhere in these names, her and you to show. “Else, being alike pure, we should neither see; As, water being into air rarefied, Neither appear, till in one cloud they be, So, for our sakes, you do low names abide.”