LUCETTA        I do not seek to quench your love’s hot fire,

But qualify the fire’s extreme rage,

Lest it should burn above the bounds of reason.

JULIA  The more thou damm’st it up, the more it burns.

The current that with gentle murmur glides

Thou know’st, 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.          (2.7.21-32)

Lucetta tries to calm Julia down, entirely reasonably: I do not seek to quench your love’s hot fire—I’m not trying to put you off completely, or to pour cold water, as it were, on all your Very Big Feelings for Proteus—but rather I’m suggesting a middle way, that you qualify the fire’s extreme rage, lest it should burn above the bounds of reason. A bit of moderation, love! You’re going over the top, and it could all backfire and, well, blow up in your face. Play with fire and you might get burned.

So Julia switches metaphor, rather beautifully. The more thou damm’st it up, the more it burns. If you try to contain the fire, it’ll just break out all over; it’ll explode! I’ll explode! Picture this. The current that with gentle murmur glides—the calmest of streams, doing its meandering thing—thou know’st, being stopped, impatiently doth rage: if you dam it up, block its flow, it’ll turn to rough water, a threatening back-up, in an instant. But when his fair course is not hindered—if the stream is simply allowed to flow—he makes sweet music with th’enamelled stones, gliding ever so softly over the pretty, shining pebbles, and giving a gentle kiss to every sedge he overtaketh in his pilgrimage, just wetting the edges of the rushes and the plants on the banks. Splash! Spray! (The stream is now imagined as a pilgrim, as Julia has imagined herself: this is love as adoration, religious devotion, perhaps misplaced and idolatrous; it comes back, of course, in Romeo and Juliet.) But the stream is also every bit as sensual in its imagining as is the fire, or the food which Julia has previous invoked: and so by many winding nooks he strays with willing sport to the wild ocean. The stream curves, curls, and wanders—perhaps morally as well as physically—and its playfulness, its little rapids and shallows, its pools and runnels, are depicted as willing sport, almost flirtatious. But its goal is the wild ocean, entirely unbounded, deep, passionate, extreme. (My bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep, Juliet will say.)

It sounds like Julia has been reading—among other things—Venus and Adonis, in her evocation, albeit metaphorical, of an erotically-loaded pastoral landscape…