Sheep were strewn over some of these terraces, making arrangements of white dots of a fascinating irregularity. Unless it has become a trick, only a great artist could make similar arrangements of equal beauty. The unknown laws which produce these inevitable accidents are great managers of the beautiful. The succession of bays in an island coast and the general form of the island itself--of course, particularly of islands off our own coast--are beautiful in their way. The shape of England and Wales, the shape of Ireland, of Man, and of the whole flock of the Hebrides please me with their unity, fascinate me with their complexity; a mistaken map of any such known place is as bad æsthetically as geographically. Children are fond of inventing islands with marvellous inlets more romantic than anything on the west coast of Scotland or Scandinavia. But I have never seen one of these invented islands that I could like apart from its creator, or its names, or its sites marked “Buried gold,” and so on. They are incredible and raise no wonder. They are not masters’ work. I do not know if geologists can support me, but Leonardo’s Cave in “The Virgin of the Rocks” always makes me uneasy by what seems to me to be its artificial impossibility. Another great picture which is, I think, faulty in a similar way reminds me of another beauty--the beauty of the scattering and gathering of the stars. I never look at Titian’s “Bacchus and Ariadne” without feeling the constellation in that glorious purple is an unhappy invention. It may be my poor astronomy, but I should be inclined to say that stars never could be spread exactly as they are in that picture. It is not merely that there is (I believe) no such constellation, but that the form is one which, for some reason, they would avoid, though by picking a star here and a star there it might be patched up. Birds always fly and fishing-boats always sail in these just patterns. Some are so just that, like that of the sheep above Bishopstone, I should like to have them copied on paper to look at for their mystical arithmetic.
The village, the mill, and the church were lower down to the right below the spring, on the modern road and its northward branches. Only a cottage, with a thatched roof on a level with my feet, lay near the green coombe track above the water. The road went on again between corn and roots, westwards now, and gradually farther from the Downs, until a cross-road from Bourton cut across it and sent it southwards a quarter-mile by a willowy spring before it turned west again.