'grots and caverns shagged with horrid shades.'—Comus, 429.
[55]. Deva: the river Dee; called a 'wizard stream' from its associations with Druidical divinations and traditions, or Milton, in his use of the epithet, may have had more particularly in his mind the belief in regard to the river as the boundary between England and Wales, that it was itself prophetic. Drayton, in his 'Polyolbion,' 10th Song, says of the Dee:
'A brook, that was supposed much business to have seen,
Which had an ancient bound twixt Wales and England been,
And noted was by both to be an ominous flood,
That changing of his fords, the future ill, or good,
Of either country told; of either's war, or peace,
The sickness, or the health, the dearth, or the increase:
And that of all the floods of Britain, he might boast
His stream in former times to have been honoured most,