Completely in love with the imagery and language in "Spring" (sigh)... and Thoreau's clever bridging of art & science

One thing that I found really interesting about Spring was how Thoreau connected all different kinds of living things together by using them to describe each other.  His use of language is exquisite and the images he creates are beautifully vivid, so much so that I sometimes got lost in his descriptions because they included so many different element. But then I would read each passage over and think wow, this is really brilliant.  I think part of this brilliance is because he is introducing a new way of seeing natural phenomena, and although we may not have thought to connect leaves and bird feathers, or humans and clay, for example, we suddenly see how they are similar:  

“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 inwardly.  The atoms have already learned this law, and are pregnant by it… The feathers and wings of birds are still drier and thinner leaves… Even ice begins with delicate and crystal leaves… The whole tree itself is but one leaf, and rivers are still vaster leaves whose pulp is intervening earth, and towns and cities are the ova of insects in their axils… You see here perchance how blood vessels are formed… What is man but a mass of thawing clay? The ball of the human finger is but a drop congealed.  The fingers and toes flow to their extent from the thawing mass of the body… Is not the hand a spreading palm leaf with its lobes and veins?”

Thoreau continues on to compare human body parts to elements of nature, creating a very striking and almost beautiful image—we (humans) are part of nature--not simply an extension of it, but part of it.

I think this is his way of showing that all things in nature overlap to an immense degree and are in many aspects related to one another (he even goes into the linguistics of it, to show how the words and sounds are related), almost as if it such resemblance was intentional by whomever created the natural world.  On page 919 he says, “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.”  It is interesting that he uses the word “artist” to describe the creator; does he mean God, or someone else?  The capitalization of “Artist” suggests that it is a title of a higher being, God or not.  The comparison of nature to an art someone contrast with all of the scientific fact and language that he includes in this chapter, but I think that it works well to pair the two, showing that they don’t have to be independent of each other.