s 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.

Here is an example, wherein he desires to express the fact that an
island called Portholme stands in the Ouse at Huntingdon.

Held on with this discourse, she--[that is, Ouse]--not so far hath run,
But that she is arrived at goodly Huntingdon
Where she no sooner views her darling and delight,
Proud Portholme, but becomes so ravished with the sight,
That she her limber arms lascivious doth throw
About the islet's waist, who being embraced so,
Her flowing bosom shows to the enamour'd Brook;

and so on.

That will be enough to show that one really might have too much of the
kind of thing. In Drayton you very soon do; every page begins to
crawl with demonstrative monsters, and there is soon a good deal
more love-making than love. But you may read Drayton for all sorts of
reasons and find some much better than others. He describes Britain
league by league, and is said to have the accuracy of a roadbook. In
thirty books, then, of perhaps 500 lines apiece, he conducts you
from Land's End to Berwick-on-Tweed, naming every river and hill,
dramatising, as it were, every convolution, contact and contour; and
not forgetting history either. That means a mighty piece of work, of
such a scope and purport that we may well grudge him the doing of it
Charles Lamb, who loved a poet because he was bad, I believe, as a
mother will love a crippled child, is more generous to Drayton than I
can be. "That panegyrist of my native earth," he calls him, "who
has gone over her soil, in his _Polyolbion_, with the fidelity of a
herald, and the painful love of a son; who has not le