g into lakes, "singular-looking" rocks,
and mountain villages like one in Castile or La Mancha but for the trees,
mountains that made him exclaim: "I have had Heaven opened to me," moors
of a "wretched russet colour," "black gloomy narrow glens." He can also
be precise and connoisseur-like, as when he describes the cataract at
Llan Rhaiadr:

"What shall I liken it to? I scarcely know, unless to an immense skein
of silk agitated and disturbed by tempestuous blasts, or to the long tail
of a grey courser at furious speed. Through the profusion of long
silvery threads or hairs, or what looked such, I could here and there see
the black sides of the crag down which the Rhyadr precipitated itself
with something between a boom and a roar."

He is still more a connoisseur when he continues:

"I never saw water falling so gracefully, so much like thin beautiful
threads as here. Yet even this cataract has its blemish. What beautiful
object has not something which more or less mars its loveliness? There
is an ugly black bridge or semicircle of rock, about two feet in diameter
and about twenty feet high, which rises some little way below it, and
under which the water, after reaching the bottom, passes, which
intercepts the sight, and prevents it from taking in the whole fall at
once. This unsightly object has stood where it now stands since the day
of creation, and will probably remain there to the day of judgment. It
would be a desecration of nature to remove it by art, but no one could
regret if nature in one of her floods were to sweep it away."

But Borrow's temperamental method--where he undertakes to do more than
sketch his environment in the blurred large method corresponding to
ordinary passing impressions--is the rhetorical sublime of this mountain
lake between Festiniog and Bala:

"I sped towards it through gorse and heather, occasionally leaping a deep
drain. At last I reached it. It was a small lake. Wearied and panting,
I flung myself on its bank, and gazed upon it.

"There lay the lake in the low bottom, surrounded by the heathery
hillocks; there it lay quite still, the hot sun reflected upon its
surface, which shone like a polished blue shield. Near the shore it was
shallow, at least near that shore upon which I lay. But farther on, my
eye, practised in deciding upon the depths of waters, saw reason to
suppose that its depth was very great. As I gazed upon it my mind
indulged in strange musings. I