ments 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 t