Spenser when he invokes the first:

"Sweete Themmes runne softly till I end my song";


or Dryden when he tells us of the second:

"The goodly Severn bravely sings
The noblest of her British kings,
At Caesar's landing what we were,
And of the Roman conquest here...."

Within England of my heart, in the whole breadth of her delight, there
is no industrial city such as infests, ruins, and spoils other lands,
and in this she resembles her great and dear mother Italy. Like her,
too, she is full of very famous towns scarcely to be matched for beauty
and ancientness in the rest of the world, and their names which are
like the words of a great poet, and which it is a pleasure to me to
recite, are Canterbury, Chichester, Winchester, Salisbury, Bath,
Wells, Exeter, and her ports, whose names are as household words, even
in Barbary, are Dover, Portsmouth, Plymouth, Falmouth, and Bristol.
All these she may well boast of, for what other land can match them
quite?

But there is a certain virtue of hers of which she is perhaps unaware,
that is nevertheless among her greatest delights: I mean her infinite
variety. Thus she is a true country, not a province; indeed, she is
made up of many counties and provinces, and each is utterly different
from other, and their different genius may be caught by the attentive
in their names, which are Kent, Sussex, Hampshire, Wiltshire, Dorset,