“Thou art beyond the mark, Ganymede,” quoth Aliena:  “his passions are greater, and his sighs discovers more loss:  perhaps in traversing these thickets, he hath seen some beautiful nymph, and is grown amorous.”

“It may be so,” quoth Ganymede, “for here he hath newly engraven some sonnet:  come, and see the discourse of the forester’s poems.”

Reading the sonnet over, and hearing him name Rosalynde, Aliena looked on Ganymede and laughed, and Ganymede looking back on the forester, and seeing it was Rosader, blushed; yet thinking to shroud all under her page’s apparel, she boldly returned to Rosader, and began thus: 

“I pray thee tell me, forester, what is this Rosalynde for whom thou pinest away in such passions?  Is she some nymph that waits upon Diana’s train, whose chastity thou hast deciphered in such epithets?  Or is she some shepherdess that haunts these plains whose beauty hath so bewitched thy fancy, whose name thou shadowest in covert under the figure of Rosalynde, as Ovid did Julia under the name of Corinna?  Or say me forsooth, is it that Rosalynde, of whom we shepherds have heard talk, she, forester, that is the daughter of Gerismond, that once was king, and now an outlaw in the forest of Arden?”

At this Rosader fetched a deep sigh, and said: 

“It is she, O gentle swain, it is she; that saint it is whom I serve, that goddess at whose shrine I do bend all my devotions; the most fairest of all fairs, the phoenix of all that sex, and the purity of all earthly perfection.”

“And why, gentle forester, if she be so beautiful, and thou so amorous, is there such a disagreement in thy thoughts?  Happily she resembleth the rose, that is sweet but full of prickles? or the serpent Regius that hath scales as glorious as the sun and a breath as infectious as the Aconitum is deadly?  So thy Rosalynde may be most amiable and yet unkind; full of favor and yet froward, coy without wit, and disdainful without reason.”

“O Shepherd,” quoth Rosader, “knewest thou her personage, graced with the excellence of all perfection, being a harbor wherein the graces shroud their virtues, thou wouldest not breathe out such blasphemy against the beauteous Rosalynde.  She is a diamond, bright but not hard, yet of most chaste operation; a pearl so orient,[1] that it can be stained with no blemish; a rose without prickles, and a princess absolute as well in beauty as in virtue.  But I, unhappy I, have let mine eye soar with the eagle against so bright a sun that I am quite blind:  I have with Apollo enamored myself of a Daphne, not, as she, disdainful, but far more chaste than Daphne:  I have with Ixion laid my love on Juno, and shall, I fear, embrace nought but a cloud.  Ah, Shepherd, I have reached at a star:  my desires have mounted above my degree, and my thoughts above my fortunes.  I being a peasant, have ventured to gaze on a princess, whose honors are too high to vouchsafe such base loves.”