For tho Pastoral doth not admit any violent passions, such as proceed from the greatest extremity, and usually accompany despair; yet because Despairing Love is not attended with those frightful and horrible consequences, but looks more like grief to be pittied, and a pleasing madness, than rage and fury, Eclogue is so far from refusing, that it rather loves, and passionately requires them. Therefore an unfortunate Shepherd may be brought in, complaining of his successless Love to the Moon, Stars, or Rocks, or to the Woods, and purling Streams, mourning the unsupportable anger, the frowns and coyness of his proud Phyllis; singing at his Nymphs door, (which Plutarch reckons among the signs of Passion) or doing any of those fooleries, which are familiar to Lovers. Yet the Passion must not rise too high, as Polyphemus’s, Galateas’s mad Lover, of whom Theocritus divinely thus, as almost of every thing else:
His was no common flame, nor could he move
In the old Arts, and beaten paths of Love,
No Flowers nor Fruits sent to oblige the Fair,
His was all Rage, and Madness:
For all violent Perturbations are to be diligently avoided by Bucolicks, whose nature it is to be soft, and easie: For in small matters, and such must all the strifes and contentions of Shepherds be, to make a great deal of adoe, is as unseemly, as to put Hercules’s Vizard and Buskins on an Infant, as Quintilian hath excellently observ’d. For since Eclogue is but weak, it seems not capable of those Commotions which belong to the Theater, and Pulpit; they must be soft, and gentle, and all its Passion must seem to flow only, and not break out: as in Virgil’s Gallus,
Ah, far from home and me You wander o’re
The Alpine snows, the farthest Western shore,
And frozen Rhine. When are we like to meet?
Ah gently, gently, lest thy tender feet
Sharp Ice may wound.
To these he may sometimes joyn some short Interrogations made to inanimate Beings, for those spread a strange life and vigor thro the whole Composure. Thus in Daphnis,
Did not You Streams, and Hazels, hear the Nymphs?
Or give the very Trees, and Fountains sense, as in Tityrus,
Thee (Tityrus) the Pines, and every Vale,
The Fountains, Hills, and every shrub did call:
for by this the Concernment is express’d; and of the like nature is that of Thyrsis, in Virgil’s Melibœus,
When Phyllis comes, my wood will all be green.