“Havod,” says Mr. Cumberland, “is a place in itself so pre-eminently beautiful, that it highly merits a particular description. It stands surrounded with so many noble scenes, diversified with elegance, as well as with grandeur; the country on the approach to it is so very wild and uncommon, and the place itself is now so embellished by art, that it will be difficult, I believe, to point out a spot that can be put in competition with it, considered either as the object of the Painter’s eye, the Poet’s mind, or as a desirable residence for those who, admirers of the beautiful wildness of nature, love also to inhale the pure air of aspiring mountains, and enjoy that _santo pacê_ (as the Italians expressively term it,) which arises from solitudes made social by a family circle. “From the portico, it commands a woody, narrow, winding vale; the undulating forms of whose ascending, shaggy sides, are richly clothed with various foliage, broken with silver water-falls, and crowned with climbing sheep-walks, reaching to the clouds. “Neither are the luxuries of life absent; for, on the margin of the Ystwith, where it flows broadest through this delicious vale, we see hot-houses, and a conservatory; beneath the rocks, a bath; amid the recesses of the woods, a flower-garden; and within the building, whose decorations, though rich, are pure and simple, we find a mass of rare and valuable literature, whose pages here seem doubly precious, where meditation finds scope to range unmolested. “In a word, so many are the delights afforded by the scenery of this place, and its vicinity, to a mind imbued with any taste, that the impression on mine was increased, after an interval of ten years from the first visit, employed chiefly in travelling among the Alps, the Appenines, the Sabine Hills, and the Tyrollese; along the shores of the Adriatic, over the Glaciers of Switzerland, and up the Rhine; where, though in search of beauty, I never, I feel, saw any thing so fine—never so many pictures concentred in one spot; so that, warned by the renewal of my acquaintance with them, I am irresistibly urged to attempt a description of the hitherto almost virgin-haunts of these obscure mountains. “Wales, and its borders, both North and South, abound, at intervals, with fine things: Piercefield has grounds of great magnificence, and wonderfully picturesque beauty. Downton Castle has a delicious woody vale, most tastefully managed; Llangollen is brilliant; the banks of the Conway savagely grand; Barmouth romantically rural; the great Pistill Rhayader is horribly wild; Rhayader Wennol, gay, and gloriously irregular—each of which merits a studied description.