rose flourished upon natural alabaster, the blush of the morn and Luna’s silver show were so lively portrayed, that the Troyan that fills out wine to Jupiter was not half so beautiful; his face was full of pleasance, and all the rest of his lineaments proportioned with such excellence, as Phoebe was fettered in the sweetness of his feature.  The idea of these perfections tumbling in her mind made the poor shepherdess so perplexed, as feeling a pleasure tempered with intolerable pains, and yet a disquiet mixed with a content, she rather wished to die than to live in this amorous anguish.  But wishing is little worth in such extremes, and therefore was she forced to pine in her malady, without any salve for her sorrows.  Reveal it she durst not, as daring in such matters to make none her secretary;[2] and to conceal it, why, it doubled her grief; for as fire suppressed grows to the greater flame, and the current stopped to the more violent stream, so love smothered wrings the heart with the deeper passions.

[Footnote 1:  unknown, unaccustomed.]

[Footnote 2:  confidante.]

Perplexed thus with sundry agonies, her food began to fail, and the disquiet of her mind began to work a distemperature of her body, that, to be short, Phoebe fell extreme sick, and so sick as there was almost left no recovery of health.  Her father, seeing his fair Phoebe thus distressed, sent for his friends, who sought by medicine to cure, and by counsel to pacify, but all in vain; for although her body was feeble through long fasting, yet she did magis aegrotare animo quam corpore.  Which her friends perceived and sorrowed at, but salve it they could not.

The news of her sickness was bruited abroad through all the forest, which no sooner came to Montanus’ ear, but he, like a madman, came to visit Phoebe.  Where sitting by her bedside he began his exordium with so many tears and sighs, that she, perceiving the extremity of his sorrows, began now as a lover to pity them, although Ganymede held her from redressing them.  Montanus craved to know the cause of her sickness, tempered with secret plaints, but she answered him, as the rest, with silence, having still the form of Ganymede in her mind, and conjecturing how she might reveal her loves.  To utter it in words she found herself too bashful; to discourse by any friend she would not trust any in her amours; to remain thus perplexed still and conceal all, it was a double death.  Whereupon, for her last refuge, she resolved to write unto Ganymede, and therefore desired Montanus to absent himself a while, but not to depart, for she would see if she could steal a nap.  He was no sooner gone out of the chamber, but reaching to her standish,[1] she took pen and paper, and wrote a letter to this effect: 

[Footnote 1:  a stand or case for pen and ink.]

“Phoebe to Ganymede wisheth what she wants herself.