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 thought of the afanc, a creature which
some have supposed to be the harmless and industrious beaver, others the
frightful and destructive crocodile. I wondered whether the afanc was
the crocodile or the beaver, and speedily had no doubt that the name was
originally applied to the crocodile.

"'O, who can doubt,' thought I, 'that the word was originally intended