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-cylindrical 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 vegetation; till at length, in the
water itself, they are converted 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.
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