but see that with care thou preserve inviolate our fires, which in thy heart thou shalt bear with thee hence.’  I was about to make answer when my tender breast was of a sudden pierced by the flying arrow loosed by the strong hand of the son of her who added these unto her former words:  ’We give him thee as thy first and only servant; he lacks nought but our fires, which, kindled even now by thee in him, be it thy care to nourish, that the frost that bound him like to Aglauros being driven from his heart, he may burn with the divine fire no less than father Jove himself.’  She ceased; and I, trembling yet with fear, no sooner opened my lips to assent to her command, than I found myself once more in prayer before her altars; whereat marvelling not a little, and casting my eyes around in search of Apyros, I became aware of the golden arrow in my breast, and near me the pale youth, his intent gaze fixed upon me, and like me wounded by the god; and so seeing him inflamed with a passion no other than that which burned in me, I laughed, and filled with contentment and desire, made sign to him to be of hopeful cheer.

The advance in style that marks the transition from the Ameto to the Arcadia must be largely accredited to Boccaccio himself.  The language of the Decameron became the model of cinquecento prose.  Sannazzaro, however, wrote in evident imitation not of the structural method only, but of the actual style of the Ameto.  Something, it is true, he added beyond the greater mastery of literary form due to training.  Even in his most luxuriant descriptions and most sensuous images we find that grace and clearness of vision which characterize the early poetry of the Renaissance proper, and combine in literature the luminous purity of Botticelli and the gem-like detail of Pinturicchio.  The mythological affectation of the elder work appears in the younger modified, refined, subordinated; there is the same delight in detailed description, but relieved by greater variety of imagination; while, even in the most laboured passages, there is a poetical feeling as well as a more subjective manner, which, combined with a remarkable power of visualization, saves them from the danger of the catalogue.  Again, there is everywhere visible the same artificiality of style which characterizes the Ameto, but purged of its more extravagant elements and less affected and conceited than it became in the works of Lyly and Sidney.  Like the Ameto, lastly, but unlike its Spanish and English successors, the Arcadia is purely pastoral, free from any chivalric admixture.