Is there anything ugly out of doors? Can the ardent, sympathetic lover of nature ever find her unlovely? We know that she is supremely utilitarian, and we have only wonder and worship for her prodigal and perfect economy. But does she always couple beauty with her utility?
To her real lover nature is never tiresome nor uninteresting; but often she is most fascinating when veiled. She has moods and tempers and habits, even physical blemishes, that are frequently discovered to the too pressing suitor; and though these may quicken his interest and faith, they often dissipate that halo of perfection with which first fancy clothed her. This intimacy, this "seeing the very pulse of the machine," is what spoils poets like Burroughs and Thoreau: spoils them for poets to make them the truer philosophers.
Like the spots on the sun, all of nature's other blemishes disappear in the bright blaze of her loveliness when viewed through a veil, whether of shadows, or mists, or distance. This is half the secret of the spell of the night, of the mystery of the sea, and the enchantment of an ancient forest. From the depths of a bed in the meadow-grass there is perfection of motion, the very soul of poetry, in the flight of a buzzard far up under the blue dome of the sky; but look at the same bald-headed, snaky-necked creature upon a fence-stake, and you wonder how leagues into the clouds ever hid his ugly visage from you. Melrose must be seen by moonlight. The light to see the buzzard in has never been on land or sea, has come no nearer than the high white clouds that drift far away in the summer sky.
From an economic point of view the buzzard is an admirable creation. So are the robin, the oriole, and most other birds; but these are admirable also from the esthetic point of view. Not so the buzzard. He has the wings of Gabriel—the wings only; for, truly, his neck and head are Lucifer's. If ugliness be an attribute of nature, then this bird is its expression incarnate. Not that he is wicked, but worse than wicked—repulsive. Now the jackal is a mean, sordid scamp, a miserable half-dog beast, a degenerate that has not fallen far, since he was never up very high. The buzzard, on the other hand, was a bird. What he is now is unnamable. He has fallen back below the reptiles, into a harpy with snake's head and bird's body—a vulture more horrid than any mythical monster.
"Ugliness incarnate."
Having once seen a turkey-buzzard feeding, one has no difficulty in accounting for the origin of those "angry creations of the gods" that defiled the banquets of King Phineus. If there is any holiness of beauty, surely the turkey-buzzard with clipped wing is the most unholy, the most utterly lost soul in the world.
One bright, warm day in January—a frog-waking day in southern New Jersey—I saw the buzzards in unusual numbers sailing over the pines beyond Cubby Hollow. Hoping for a glimpse of something social in the silent, unemotional solitaries, I hurried over to the pines, and passing through the wood, found a score of the birds feasting just beyond the fence in an open field.