SPRING, 
327 
with its stalactites laid open to the light. The various 
shades of the sand are singularly rich and agreeable, 
embracing the different iron colors, brown, gray, yellow¬ 
ish, and reddish. When the flowing mass reaches the 
drain at the foot of the bank it spreads out flatter into 
strands , the separate streams losing their semi-cylindri- 
cal form and gradually becoming more flat and broad, 
running together as they are more moist, till they form 
an almost flat sand , still variously and beautifully shaded, 
but in which you can trace the original forms of vegeta¬ 
tion ; till at length, in the water itself, they are .convert¬ 
ed into banks , like those formed off the mouths of rivers, 
and the forms of vegetation are lost in the ripple marks 
on the bottom. 
The whole bank, which is from twenty to forty feet 
high, is sometimes overlaid with a mass of this kind of 
foliage, or sandy rupture, for a quarter of a mile on one 
or both sides, the produce of one spring day. What 
makes this sand foliage remarkable is its springing into 
existence thus suddenly. When I see on the one side 
the inert bank,—for the sun acts on one side first,— 
and on the other this luxuriant foliage, the creation of 
an hour, I am affected as if in a peculiar sense I stood 
in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world and 
me,—had come to where he was still at work, sporting 
on this bank, and with excess of energy strewing his 
fresh designs about. I feel as if I were .nearer to the 
vitals of the globe, for this sandy overflow is something 
such a foliaceous mass as the vitals of the animal body. 
You find thus in the very sands an anticipation of the 
vegetable leaf. No wonder that the earth expresses 
itself outwardly in leaves, it so labors with the idea in¬ 
wardly. The atoms have already learned this law, and 
