Of all her gifts her wisdom pleaseth most,
Of all her graces virtue she doth boast:
For all these gifts my life and joy is lost,
If Rosalynde prove cruel and unkind.
In these and such like passions Rosader did every day eternize the name of his Rosalynde; and this day especially when Aliena and Ganymede, enforced by the heat of the sun to seek for shelter, by good fortune arrived in that place, where this amorous forester registered his melancholy passions. They saw the sudden change of his looks, his folded arms, his passionate sighs: they heard him often abruptly call on Rosalynde, who, poor soul, was as hotly burned as himself, but that she shrouded her pains in the cinders of honorable modesty. Whereupon, guessing him to be in love, and according to the nature of their sex being pitiful in that behalf, they suddenly brake off his melancholy by their approach, and Ganymede shook him out of his dumps thus:
"What news, forester? hast thou wounded some deer, and lost him in the fall? Care not man for so small a loss: thy fees was but the skin, the shoulder, and the horns: 'tis hunter's luck to aim fair and miss; and a woodman's fortune to strike and yet go without the game."
"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."