HEN-HAWKS 145 



Sympathizing man regards the wildness of some animals, 

 their strangeness to him, as a sin ; as if all their virtue 

 consisted in their tamableness. He has always a charge 

 in his gun ready for their extermination. What we call 

 wildness is a civilization other than our own. The hen- 

 hawk shuns the farmer, but it seeks the friendly shelter 

 and support of the pine. It will not consent to walk in 

 the barn-yard, but it loves to soar above the clouds. It 

 has its own way and is beautiful, when we would fain 

 subject it to our will. So any surpassing work of art is 

 strange and wild to the mass of men, as is genius itself. 

 No hawk that soars and steals our poultry is wilder than 

 genius, and none is more persecuted or above persecu- 

 tion. It can never be poet laureate, to say " Pretty Poll " 

 and " Polly want a cracker." 



March 15, 1860. A hen-hawk sails away from the 

 wood southward. I get a very fair sight of it sailing 

 overhead. What a perfectly regular and neat outline it 

 presents ! an easily recognized figure anywhere. Yet I 

 never see it represented in any books. The exact cor- 

 respondence of the marks on one side to those on the 

 other, as the black or dark tip of one wing to the other, 

 and the dark line midway the wing. I have no idea that 

 one can get as correct an idea of the form and color of 

 the under sides of a hen-hawk's wings by spreading 

 those of a dead specimen in his study as by looking up 

 at a free and living hawk soaring above him in the 

 fields. The penalty for obtaining a petty knowledge thus 

 dishonestly is that it is less interesting to men generally, 

 as it is less significant. Some, seeing and admiring the 

 neat figure of the hawk sailing two or three hundred 



