necessary about Llangollen Fair."

But this is a somewhat exceptional passage, and the same detachment is
rarely found except in his descriptions of scenery, which are short and
serve well enough to remind the reader of the great hills, the rapid
waters, the rocks, and the furnaces, chimneys and pits. Borrow certainly
does remind us of these things. In the first place he does so by a
hundred minute and scattered suggestions of the romantic and sublime, and
so general that only a pedant will object to the nightingales which he
heard singing in August near Bethesda. He gives us black mountains,
gloomy shadows, cascades falling 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