"The current that with gentle motion glides, Thou knowest, being stopped, impatiently doth rage; But when his fair course is not hindered, He makes sweet music with th' enamelled stones, _Giving a gentle kiss to every sedge_ _He overtaketh in his pilgrimage;_ And so by many winding nooks he strays With willing sport to the wild ocean." Is it not perfect? SEWARD. It is. Music--Painting, and Poetry-- BULLER. Sculpture and architecture. NORTH. Buller, you're a blockhead. Dear Mr Alison, in his charming _Essays on Taste_, finds a little fault in what seems to me a great beauty in this, one of the sweetest passages in Shakspeare. BULLER. Sweetest. That's a miss-mollyish word. NORTH. Ass. One of the sweetest passages in Shakspeare. He finds fault with the Current kissing the Sedges. "The pleasing personification which we attribute to a brook is founded upon the faint belief of voluntary motion, and is immediately checked when the Poet _descends_ to any minute or particular resemblance." SEWARD. Descends! NORTH. The word, to my ear, does sound strangely; and though his expression, "faint belief," is a true and a fine one, yet here the doctrine does not apply. Nay, here we have a true notion inconsiderately misapplied. Without doubt Poets of more wit than sensibility do follow on a similitude beyond the suggestion of the contemplated subject. But the rippling of water against a sedge suggests a kiss--is, I believe, a kiss--liquid, soft, loving, _lipped_. BULLER. Beautiful. NORTH. Buller, you are a fellow of fine taste. Compare the whole catalogue of metaphorical kisses--admitted and claimable--and you will find this one of the most natural of them all. Pilgrimage, in Shakspeare's day, had dropt, in the speech of our Poets, from its early religious propriety, of seeking a holy place under a vow, into a roving of the region. See his "Passionate Pilgrim." If Shakspeare found the word so far generalised, then "wanderer through the woods," or plains, or through anything else, is the suggestion of the beholding. The river is more, indeed; being, like the pilgrim, on his way to a term, and an obliged way--"the wild ocean." SEWARD. The "faint belief of voluntary motion"--Mr Alison's fine phrase--is one, and possibly the grounding incentive to impersonating the "current" here; but other elements enter in; liquidity--transparency--which suggest a spiritual nature, and Beauty which moves Love. NORTH.