town. Indeed Wiltshire people are nearly as bad as the Cockneys, who
always call their Thames "the river," which is as if a man might say
"the railway."

Beautiful how Burns personified his rivers! More, he individualised
them. The same verb won't do. You have:

Where Cart rins rowin' to the sea,

but

Where Doon rins wimplin' clear;

And Dante says, or makes Francesca say,

Siede la terra dove nata fui
Sulla marina dove Po discende
Per aver pace co' seguaci sui.

_Per aver pace_: a lovely phrase. And that brings me to Michael
Drayton.

That was a poet--author also of one lovely lyric--who treated our
rivers after the fashion of his day, which ran to length and tedious
excess. Shakespeare's _Venus and Adonis_ is by pages too long; but
that is nothing to Drayton's masterpiece. With the best dispositions
in the world I have never been able to get right through the
_Polyolbion_. His anthropomorphism is surprising, and a little of it
only, amusing.