THYRSIS. 'If the acuteness of your fair intellect, loveless shepherd, did not assure me that with ease it can attain the truth, from which it finds itself so far at present, rather than put myself to the trouble of contradicting your opinion, I would leave you in it, as a punishment for your unjust words. But because those you have uttered in blame of love show me the good germs you possess by which you may be brought to a better purpose, I do not wish by my silence to leave those who hear us scandalised, love despised, and you pertinacious and vainglorious; and so, being aided by Love on whom I call, I think in a few words to show how different are his works and effects from those you have declared about him, speaking only of the love you mean, which you defined when you said that it was a desire for beauty, and likewise declared what beauty was, and a little later you closely examined all the effects which the love of which you speak produced in loving breasts, finally strengthening your views with various unhappy events caused by love. And though the definition you made of love may be the one most generally given, yet it is not so much so but that it may be contradicted; for love and desire are two different things, since not everything that is loved is desired, nor everything that is desired loved. The reasoning is clear in the case of all things that are possessed, for then it cannot be said that they are desired, but that they are loved: thus, he who has health will not say that he desires health, but that he loves it; and he who has children cannot say that he desires children, but that he loves his children; nor yet can it be said of the things that are desired that they are loved, as of the death of enemies, which is desired and not loved. And so for this reason love and desire come to be different passions of the will. The truth is that love is the father of desire, and amongst other definitions which are given of love this is one. Love is that first change which we feel caused in our mind by the appetite which moves us and draws us to itself, delighting and pleasing us; and that pleasure begets motion in the soul, which motion is called desire, and, in short, desire is a motion of the appetite in regard to what is loved, and a wish for that which is possessed, and its object is happiness. And as there are found different species of desires, and love is a species of desire which looks to and regards the happiness which is called fair, yet for a clearer definition and division of love it must be understood that it is divided into three kinds, chaste love, useful love, and delectable love. And to these three forms of love are reduced all the kinds of loving and desiring that can exist in our will: for the chaste love regards the things of Heaven, eternal and divine; the useful, the things of earth, full of joy and doomed to perish, such as wealth, powers, and lordships; the delectable,