From this transformation I So much bliss and pride should gain That of love I would attain To the palm and victory. If 'twere so, then jealousy Would so much my champion prove, That, if jealousy were love, Nothing I save love should be. With this last song of the jealous Orfenio, the discreet shepherds made an end of their eclogue, leaving all who had heard them satisfied with their discretion: especially Damon and Thyrsis, who felt great pleasure at hearing them, for it seemed to them that the reasonings and arguments which the four shepherds had propounded to carry through their proposition, seemed of more than shepherd wit. But a contest having arisen between many of the bystanders as to which of the four had pleaded his cause best, at last the opinion of all came to agree with that which discreet Damon gave, saying to them that he for his part held that, among all the distasteful and unpleasing things that love brings with it, nothing so much distresses the loving breast as the incurable plague of jealousy, and neither Orompo's loss, nor Crisio's absence, nor Marsilio's despair could be equalled to it. 'The cause is,' he said, 'that it is not in reason that things which have become impossible of attainment should be able for long to compel the will to love them, or weary the desire to attain them; for when a man has the will and desire to attain the impossible, it is clear that the more desire is excessive in him, the more he would lack understanding. And for this same reason I say that the pain Orompo suffers is but grief and pity for a lost happiness; and because he has lost it in such a way that it is not possible to recover it again, this impossibility must be the cause of his sorrow ending. For although human understanding cannot be always so united with reason as to cease feeling the loss of the happiness which cannot be recovered, and must in fact give tokens of its feeling by tender tears, ardent sighs, and piteous words, under pain, should one not do this, of being counted rather brute than rational man--in a word, the course of time cures this sorrowing, reason softens it, and new events have a great share in blotting it from memory. All this is the contrary in absence, as Crisio well pointed out in his verses, for, as in the absent one, hope is so united to desire, the postponement of return gives him terrible distress; seeing that, as nothing hinders him from enjoying his happiness except some arm of the sea, or some stretch of land, it seems to him, having the chief thing, which is the good-will of the beloved person, that flagrant wrong is done to his bliss, in that things so trivial as a little water or land should hinder his happiness and glory. To this pain are also joined the fear of being forgotten, and the changes of human hearts; and so long as absence endures, strange