In my lamentings I have found
  A very pity in the pebbly waters,
  And I have found the trees
  Return them a kind voice: 
  But never have I found,
  Nor ever hope to find,
  Compassion in this hard and beautiful
  What shall I call her?

Aminta describes to Tirsis how his love grew from boyhood up: 

  There grew by little and little in my heart,
  I knew not from what root,
  But just as the grass grows that sows itself,
  An unknown something which continually
  Made me feel anxious to be with her.

Sylvia kisses him: 

  Never did bee from flower
  Suck sugar so divine
  As was the honey that I gathered then
  From those twin roses fresh.

In Act II.  Scene 1, the rejected Satyr, like the rejected Polyphemus or Amaryllis in Theocritus, complains in antitheses which recall Longos: 

The woods hide serpents, lions, and bears under their green shade, and in your bosom hatred, disdain, and cruelty dwell....  Alas, when I bring the earliest flowers, you refuse them obstinately, perhaps because lovelier ones bloom on your own face; if I offer beautiful apples, you reject them angrily, perhaps because your beautiful bosom swells with lovelier ones.... and yet I am not to be despised, for I saw myself lately in the clear water, when winds were still and there were no waves.

This is the sentimental pastoral poetry of Hellenism reborn and intensified.

So with the elegiac motive so loved by Alexandrian and Roman poets, praise of a happy past time; the chorus sings in Aminta: 

  O lovely age of gold,
  Not that the rivers rolled
  With milk, or that the woods wept honeydew;
  Not that the ready ground
  Produced without a wound,
  Or the mild serpent had no tooth that slew.... 
  But solely that.... the law of gold,
  That glad and golden law, all free, all fitted,
  Which Nature’s own hand wrote—­What pleases is permitted!... 
  Go! let us love, the daylight dies, is born;
  But unto us the light
  Dies once for all, and sleep brings on eternal night.

Over thirty pastoral plays can be ascribed to Italy in the last third of the sixteenth century.  The most successful imitator of Tasso was Giovanni Battista Guarini (born 1537) in The True Shepherd (II Pastor Fido).  One quotation will shew how he outvied Aminta.  In Act I, Scene 1, Linko says: 

  Look round thee, Sylvia; behold
  All in the world that’s amiable and fair
  Is love’s sweet work:  heaven loves, the earth, the sea,
  Are full of love and own his mighty sway. 
  Love through the woods
  The fiercest beasts; love through the waves attends
  Swift gliding dolphins and the sluggish whales. 
  That little bird which sings.... 
  Oh, had he human sense,
  ‘I burn with love,’ he’d cry, ‘I burn with love,’
  And in his heart he truly burns,
  And in his warble speaks
  A language, well by his dear mate conceived,
  Who answering cries, ‘And I too burn with love.’