"Sapless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fallen low. In the days of his prosperity, he had many friends, so called. Adversity has shaken them all like dead leaves from sapless branches." ...
— Ten Nights in a Bar Room • T. S. Arthur
... life the wood of the bin-gum is of pale straw colour with a faint pinkish tinge, and tough though light. Sapless age makes it tindery, and the decaying fibre descends in dust—glissades of dust which form moraines within the hollow of the base. Then the end is ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... own brother of the clod, That from his hand the crook wouldst snatch away And shake instead thy dry and sapless rod, To scare the sheep out of the wholesome day? Yea, what art thou, blind, unconverted Jew, That with thy idol-volume's covers two Wouldst make a jail to ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... These eyes, like lamps whose wasting oil is spent, Wax dim, as drawing to their exigent; Weak shoulders, overborne with burdening grief, And pithless arms, like to a wither'd vine That droops his sapless branches to the ground: Yet are these feet, whose strengthless stay is numb, Unable to support this lump of clay, Swift-winged with desire to get a grave, As witting I no other comfort have. But tell me, keeper, ...
— King Henry VI, First Part • William Shakespeare [Aldus edition]
... written on Shakespeare. The literati were captivated. But alas, scholars were not. They admitted that Brandes had written an interesting book, that he had accumulated immense stores of information and given to these sapless materials a new life and a new attractiveness. But they pointed out that not only did his work contain gross positive errors, but it consisted, from first to last, of a tissue of speculations which, however ingenious, had no foundation in fact and no ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... speak truth, reader, there is no excellent beauty, no accomplished grace, no reliable refinement, without strength as excellent, as complete, as trustworthy. As well might you look for good fruit and blossom on a rootless and sapless tree, as for charms that will endure in a feeble and relaxed nature. For a little while, the blooming semblance of beauty may flourish round weakness; but it cannot bear a blast: it soon fades, even in serenest sunshine. Graham would have started had ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... moreover, that they were mostly very common people. Gradually the old man seems to have developed a preference for two or three strictly exquisite intimates, over a throng of your vulgar pensioners. His tardy literary schemes, too—fruit of his all but sapless senility—have absorbed more and more of his time and attention. The end of it all is, therefore, that Theodore and I have him quite to ourselves, and that it behooves us ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... annihilation to defeat: But having run thy gauntlet of their days, This Autumn remnant of some unknown race, Nearing the Winter of their sad decay, Fall like dry leaves into the lap of Time; Their old trunks sapless, their tough branches bare, And Fate's shrill war-whoop thund'ring ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... serves but to mock awhile his awakened mind with recollections of a happy past, so had the Indian summer shone on Nature's tired heart, and mocked, and passed away. The last red roseleaf had fluttered silently down; the last purple sloe had fallen from its sapless stem. ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... that their work, learned or unlearned, must needs be fortunately balanced also, they arise sometimes in the midst of mere artistic worry and vexation of spirit, or of artist bleakness, perfect like the almond and peach trees, which blossom, white and pink, on the frost-bitten green among the sapless vines of wintry Tuscan hills; and to some natures, doubtless, these are more pleasant and health-giving than more mature or mellow summer or autumnal loveliness. But, as I have said, each must find his own closest affinities in art and ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... spark that seems to make each interpretation of a masterpiece—a living thing. It exists only for the moment, and cannot be explained. For instance, two pianists of equal technical ability may play the same composition. With one the playing is dull, lifeless and sapless, with the other there is something that is indescribably wonderful. His playing seems fairly to quiver with life. It commands interest and inspires the audience. What is this vital spark that brings life to mere notes? In one way it may be called the intense artistic ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... of November The fog forms and shifts; All the world comes out again When the fog lifts. Loosened from their sapless twigs Leaves drop with every gust; Drifting, rustling, out of sight In the ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... horses was killed, and its scanty flesh, cut into strips, was dried in the sun and smoke. This, the most repellant, sapless food to be found in the world, had been their diet for some time. Douglas was the first to die. The survivors were still strong enough to give him burial. In a few days Taylor followed him and was interred by his side. The blacks threatened them continually, though at times they would ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... of the question of the former's incapacity. He seemed over-educated—had retained, not digested his learning; and beautiful flowers of literature were attached to him by filaments of memory, as lovely orchids to sapless sticks. Hence he failed to understand the force of language, and became the victim of his own metaphors, mistaking them for facts. He had the irritable vanity and weak nerves of a woman, and was bold to rashness in speculation, destitute as he ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... there with some redeeming oases. Its verdure smacks of the wilderness. Stunted brown and grey, the heather from which these rolling steppes take their name is stranger to the more clement tinge of green, which is the sign of a soil less sapless. Yet a peculiar fascination militates against a general condemnation of the pitiless Karoo. One cannot altogether banish from one's mind the memories of a summer night upon those wastes. Those of you who have laboured in the desert of the Egyptian Soudan ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... a line of communication. The Mesopotamian Desert presses it closely upon the one side, and the Arabian upon the other. The river flows mostly in a deep bed between cliffs of marl, gypsum, and limestone, or else between bare hills producing only a few dry sapless shrubs and a coarse grass; and there are but rare places where, except by great efforts, the water can be raised so as to irrigate, to any extent, the land along either bank. The course of the stream is fringed by date-palms as high as Anah, and above is dotted occasionally with willows, ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 4. (of 7): Babylon • George Rawlinson
... ye the blast, Whose Orphic thunder thrilling calls From ruin her Titanian walls? 705 Whose spirit shakes the sapless bones Of Slavery? Argos, Corinth, Crete Hear, and from their mountain thrones The daemons and the nymphs repeat ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... angrily upon the baron). Am I A weak old man because my hair is gray, Because my hands are wrinkled, ay, and hard, Because at times my armor chafes my back? Am I an old and sapless log? A man Used up who shall ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... neglected corner, I once knew in a flourishing state in a forest. It was full of sap, full of leaves, and full of boughs; but now in vain does the busy art of man pretend to vie with nature, by tying that withered bundle of twigs to its sapless trunk; it is now at best but the reverse of what it was, a tree turned upside-down, the branches on the earth, and the root in the air; it is now handled by every dirty wench, condemned to do her drudgery, and, by a capricious kind ...
— The Battle of the Books - and Other Short Pieces • Jonathan Swift
... in, as we advance in life, are our tastes? We suppose that it is our joints which feel the premonitions of age; and that because we no longer wish to dance or play ball or sprint in college races we are in the earliest stage of that sapless condition when the hinges of the body grind dryly upon one another, and we lose a good inch of our stature, through shrinkage, though the spine still ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... icy-cold; And all around—But wherefore this to thee Who in few minutes more thyself shalt see?— I left poor Scylla in a niche and fled. My fever'd parchings up, my scathing dread Met palsy half way: soon these limbs became 640 Gaunt, wither'd, sapless, feeble, ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... did send for thee, That Talbot's name might be in thee revived, When sapless age and weak, unable limbs, Should bring thy father to his drooping chair. But—O malignant and ill-boding stars!— First part ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... made Reuben tremble. The middle and lower branches were in luxuriant life, and an excess of vegetation had fringed the trunk almost to the ground; but a blight had apparently stricken the upper part of the oak, and the very topmost bough was withered, sapless, and utterly dead. Reuben remembered how the little banner had fluttered on that topmost bough, when it was green and lovely, eighteen years before. Whose guilt ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... beastly attempts upon me, as well at Lycurgus's as in his own house; and Tryphoena endeavouring to stop my mouth, had her share with him, for I set out her harlotry to the mob, who were got about us to hear the scolding: And as a proof of what I said, I shew'd them poor sapless Gito, and my self also, whom that itch of the whore had ...
— The Satyricon • Petronius Arbiter
... now tormented him, but the furrow was dry. In the morning, he remembered it had contained a little water from the rain, which during the day had sunk into the earth. He picked a bennet from the grass and bit it, but it was sapless, dried by the summer heat. He looked for a leaf of sorrel, but there was none. The slow hours wore on; the sun sank below the wood, and the long shadows stretched out. By-and-by the grass became cooler to the touch; dew was forming ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... and chiefly, much intertexture and intensity of passion. You thus convey to us more largely and expeditiously the stores of your understanding and imagination, than you ever could by sonnets or canzonets, or sinewless and sapless allegories. ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... carried hack to that grand vision of the prophet who saw the bones lying, very many and very dry, sapless and disintegrated, a heap dead and ready to rot. The question comes to him: 'Son of man! Can these bones live?' The only possible answer, if he consult experience, is, 'O Lord God! Thou knowest.' Then follows the great invocation: 'Come from the four winds, O Breath! ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... shudderingly; The river was dumb and could not speak, For the weaver Winter its shroud had spun; A single crow on the tree-top bleak From his shining feathers shed off the cold sun; 245 Again it was morning, but shrunk and cold, As if her veins were sapless and old, And she rose up decrepitly For a last dim look ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... ahead for signs of water. Isham the fiddler left his violin in its case; he never took it from that case again. The oxen had grown gaunt from lack of feed and drink; they wandered about the night camps nibbling disdainfully at what growth there was, low bitter sapless weeds. ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... labour, to marry, eat strong flesh, and beget strong children—the power of doing all this would pass away with youth, which was terribly transitory. I bethought me that a time would come when my eyes would be bleared, and, perhaps, sightless; my arms and thighs strengthless and sapless; when my teeth would shake in my jaws, even supposing they did not drop out. No going a wooing then—no labouring—no eating strong flesh, and begetting lusty children then; and I bethought me how, when all this should ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... drooped and slanted away from the wind, while others that had fallen lay about their roots. Farther in, the damage was less, but the ears were half-filled and shriveled. The field was parti-colored, for the dull, dark green had changed to a dingy, sapless hue, and the riper patches had a sickly yellow tinge instead ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... careful survey of the subject was made by Frederick Law Olmsted, a New York farmer, who wrote what but for their gloomy subject would be among the best books of travel. He presents to us the picture of a prevailingly sullen, sapless, brutish life, but certainly not of acute misery or habitual oppression. A Southerner old enough to remember slavery would probably not question the accuracy of his details, but would insist, very likely with truth, that there was more human happiness ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... Medora Giles to be able to keep away from her, but the approach of Adrian Bond—he was a great studio dawdler—presently put her to rout. For Adrian was much too small. He was spare, he was meagre; he was sapless, like his books; and the part in his smoothly plastered black hair scarcely reached to her eyebrows. She felt herself swelling, distending, filling her place to repletion, to suffocation, and rose to flee. ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... as Tyler says, the New England theocracy was a social structure resting on a book, that corner-stone was the Bay Psalm-Book and the walls above it were built of sermons. These sermons seem to us technical, sapless, and jejune, "as soporific as a bed of poppies," but they show the intelligence, energy, and assiduity of the writers just as plainly as they show the gloomy theology and sad earnestness of the time. And though no one now reads them, we profoundly ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... to sip, always seeks the juices of new growths, this is the fault of the sapless flowers, ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... of the dream-drive honeymoon lingered. And the bit of bark, sapless, brown, curled up by the heat into almost a tube, and partially eaten by white ants—before the desecrating assault had been discovered and the termites' nest destroyed with boiling water—was still ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... like sleep-walking than waking, conscious progress—this melancholy journey. The dry, parched grass, the leaves depending wilted and sapless, the leaden air, the hot, red globe of dull light hanging before her in the eastern heavens—all seemed a part of the lifeless, hopeless pall which weighed from every point upon her, deadening thought and senses. The difficult ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... was none other of her age and sex in their community, had no rival in their hearts. She was the one joy of their laborious and ascetic hours; she represented all the sweetness and youth of this self-renewing world, which to them was so grey and sapless. Moreover, she was a lovely maid, who, wherever she had been placed, would have ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... that neglected corner, I once knew in a flourishing state in a forest; it was full of sap, full of leaves, and full of boughs: but now in vain does the busy art of man pretend to vie with nature, by tying that withered bundle of twigs to its sapless trunk. It is now at best but the reverse of what it was, a tree turned upside down, the branches on the earth, and the root in the air. It is now handled by every dirty wench, condemned to do her drudgery, and by a capricious kind of fate, destined to make her things clean, and be nasty itself. ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... Of runnel blooms, the dreamy wanderer saw, The wilder for the vision of the moon, Stark desolations and a waste of plain, All smit by flame and broken with the storms; Black ghosts of trees, and sapless trunks that stood Harsh hollow channels of the fiery noise, Which ran from bole to bole a year before, And grew with ruin, and was like, indeed, The roar of mighty winds with wintering streams That foam about the limits of the land And mix their swiftness ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... living; I see the signs of the extinction of the sun, the moon, the stars; I see the breath of life exhaling from the elements; I see Nature abandoned and apart, reduced to barrenness, crouching in her decrepitude; I see Time sapless and trembling, for his end has come, and he is seated on an arid throne; and while I hear the trumpets of the angels with their thunder shake the hearts of all, I see both Life and Death convulsed with horrible ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... on, he clasping his gun with nerveless hands, she breaking the sapless twigs as she passed, with ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... When Thou draw'st blood is Thy rose-tree. Crosses make straight his crooked ways, And clouds but cool his dog-star days; Diseases too, when by Thee blest, Are both restoratives and rest. Flow'rs that in sunshines riot still, Die scorch'd and sapless; though storms kill, The fall is fair, e'en to desire, Where in their sweetness all expire. O come, pour on! what calms can be So fair as storms, that ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... her, but I'll keep her for myself, It were a sin to give her to his age— To twine the blooming garland of the spring Around the sapless trunks of wither'd oaks— The night, methinks, grows ruder than it was, Thus should it be, thus nature should be shock'd, And Prodigies, affrighting all mankind, Foretell the dreadful business I intend. The earth should gape, and swallow ...
— The Prince of Parthia - A Tragedy • Thomas Godfrey
... heads, abdomens and thoraxes, emptied of their fleshy substance and reduced to the tough outer skin, are easily counted. If the larva has chewed these overmuch, the wings at least are left; these are sapless organs which the Philanthus absolutely scorns. They are likewise spared by moisture, putrefaction and time, so much so that it is no more difficult to take an inventory of a cell several years old than one of ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... been bestowed on four human beings who needed it more woefully. They looked as if they had never known what youth or pleasure was, but had been the offspring of Nature's dotage, and always the gray, decrepit, sapless, miserable creatures who now sat stooping round the doctor's table without life enough in their souls or bodies to be animated even by the prospect of growing young again. They drank off the water and replaced their glasses ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... portion of manure dropt on the high road becomes a prize, if not an object of contention, to the nearest vignerons. The air of cheerfulness and beauty, however, which we annex to our notions of high cultivation, is wholly wanting. The appearance of the vines was that of sapless black stumps, about thirty inches high, and pruned so as to leave only four or five eyes; and though the subject of poverty is too serious to joke on, the withered and stunted appearance of the country people exactly corresponded to ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... now his sapless Trunk he stripp'd, Like Culprits sentenc'd to be whipp'd, When lo! th' Initials rose to View, And prov'd the Fiend's Conjecture true. And all his Waist (detested Brand!) Was scribbled with the Dev'l's short ...
— The Methodist - A Poem • Evan Lloyd
... root need others, nor doth the pruner's hand Shrink to restore the topmost shoot to earth That gave it being. Nay, marvellous to tell, Lopped of its limbs, the olive, a mere stock, Still thrusts its root out from the sapless wood, And oft the branches of one kind we see Change to another's with no loss to rue, Pear-tree transformed the ingrafted apple yield, And stony cornels on the plum-tree blush. Come then, and learn what tilth to ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... corn-stalk! you sapless stub! cried the wood- chopper. You have grown wordy, since the affair of the turkey; but if you are for a single shot, here goes at that bird ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... own son that from me you wring, I deceived not the King. But slay me, even me, And let my boy be. A mother most hapless, My bosom is sapless. Mine eyes one tearful river, My frame one fearful shiver, My husband sonless ever, And I a sonless wife To live a death in life. O, my son! O, God of Truth! O, my unrewarded youth! O, my birthless sicknesses, Until doom without redress! ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... him. There was only one thing that could protect him in the night, and that was fire. With a feverish energy, regardless now of the rustlings about his little island, he began to cut the tallest of the reeds that were hard and sapless, and these he banked in six heaps round the base of the mound; and when the task was done he reared a bigger pile in the centre ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... powerless) 158; cramp, reduce, sprain, strain, blunt the edge of; dilute, impoverish; decimate; extenuate; reduce in strength, reduce the strength of; mettre de l'eau dans son vin[Fr]. Adj. weak, feeble, debile|; impotent &c. 158; relaxed, unnerved, &c. v.; sapless, strengthless[obs3], powerless; weakly, unstrung, flaccid, adynamic[obs3], asthenic[obs3]; nervous. soft, effeminate, feminate[obs3], womanly. frail, fragile, shattery[obs3]; flimsy, unsubstantial, insubstantial, gimcrack, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... rootlets tightly woven about my whole person, so that I was like a colossal basket-worm in its case, or a big man-shaped bottle covered with wicker-work. It appeared as if the roots had grown round me! Luckily they were quite sapless and brittle, and without bothering my brains too much about the matter, I set to work to rid myself of them. After stripping the woody covering off, I found that my tourist suit of rough Scotch homespun had not suffered much harm, although the cloth exuded a damp, moldy smell; also ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... than it seemed to be; one would have compared her, not to some piece of exuberant normal vegetation, but rather to a rank, evilly-fostered growth. The putrid soil of that nether world yields other forms besides the obviously blighted and sapless. ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... that the blossoms now so vigorous and blooming, may all drop off on the second or third day; and the naked plant, after making a sprawling and almost successful attempt to reach the ceiling for a week or so, shall become suddenly sapless and withered, the emblem of a broken-down and emaciated sot—and, what is more, ruined from the self-same cause, an overdose of stimulating fluid. It may happen, on the other hand, that the plant shall have suffered no trick of the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 448 - Volume 18, New Series, July 31, 1852 • Various
... berries far into the summer. Perhaps if the country be taken at large there is never a time when there is not a flower of some kind out, in this or that warm southern nook. The sun never sets, nor do the flowers ever die. There is life always, even in the dry fir-cone that looks so brown and sapless. ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... attainments, succeed, on my theory, in the injection of liquid rosin, or turpentine, into the cells of a piece of broad-grained pine from which we can be sure its original sap has been withdrawn, and keep it well exposed to dry air for seven or so years; by its side a belly, cut from the same piece, in its sapless state; and then make two violins exactly alike in back and thicknesses of plates, etc., of the two pieces of pine, the one raw and sapless, its other half with an injection of rosin; I say we have done somewhat to allay anxiety on such a vital question, and can the more ...
— Violin Making - 'The Strad' Library, No. IX. • Walter H. Mayson
... The plain English of both may be this, "that fools and malignants, such as (in some measure) know not the cause, and such as have no love at all to the cause, should be outcasts from this covenant." Such sapless and rotten stuff will but weaken, if not ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... grows long of live and dead pretenders To that which none will gain—or none will know The conqueror at least; who, ere Time renders His last award, will have the long grass grow Above his burnt-out brain, and sapless cinders. If I might augur, I should rate but low Their chances;—they're too numerous, like the thirty[594] Mock tyrants, when Rome's ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... Knap. A sapless old Hen, you might as well have lain with a Paring-Shovel; but what think you of a young Woman, that's warm, ...
— The Fine Lady's Airs (1709) • Thomas Baker
... wish to win reputation before they are toothless. Of course if your work is strong, and you can afford to wait, the probability is that half a dozen people will at last begin to shout that you have been monstrously neglected, as you have. But that happens when you are hoary and sapless, and when nothing under the ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... that such verdure should have burst out from the dry and rotten stump of his own sinful nature, exclaims, 'I am like a green fir-tree.' That is another reason why he will have no more to do with idols. They could never have made his sapless nature break into leafage. But what of the fourth clause—'From Me is thy fruit found'? Can we understand that to mean that Ephraim still speaks, keeping up the image of the previous clause, and declaring that all the new fruitfulness which he finds in himself he recognises to be God's, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... shadow, so human life in its divine appointment moves by turns through sorrow and through joy. Each has its service for the soul, as for the earth has day and night each its ministry and message. Of pain come hardihood and strength and sympathy. What a sapless, fibreless thing is a man untrained by endurance and untaught by suffering! How flaccid in muscle, how narrow in intelligence, how shallow ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... boist'rous child, November, strays Amid those scenes that wak'd the poet's lyre, Shakes his green canopy, and loves to raise, Of sapless leaves, an altar ...
— Poems • Sir John Carr
... increased, and presently an animal leaped forth, of what kind I was unable to discover. Heart-struck by this disappointment, but not discouraged, I continued to watch, but in vain. The day was advancing apace. At length the sun arose, and its beams glistened on the edges of the cliffs above, whose sapless stalks and rugged masses were covered with hoarfrost. I began to despair of success, but was unwilling to depart until it was no longer possible to hope for the return of this extraordinary personage. Whether he had been swallowed up by some of the abysses of this grotto, or lurked near ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... he was least of all interested in the middle-class theorists. The fruit borne by such trees is too often sapless: all the juices of life are wasted in ideas. Christophe did not distinguish between one idea and another. He had no preference even for ideas which were his own when he came upon them congealed in systems. ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... curve; and every angle must subtend a certain arc, to be easily found on reference to the tables of the text-books. "The melancholy days have come" for Art, when the meditative student finds his early footsteps loud among these dry, withered, and sapless leaves, instead of brushing away the dews by the fountains of perpetual youth. I am aware of no extant English work on Greek Lines which does not aim to reduce that magnificent old Hellenic poetry to the cold, hard limitations of Geometry. Modern Pharisees nail ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... close embrace, like that of Death, Earth's pulseless heart reposes, mute and chill; Within her frozen breast, her frozen breath, In its forgotten fragrance, slumbereth still: Sapless her veins, and numb her withered arms, That still, outstretched, stand grim mementos drear Of her once gorgeous and full-leaved charms. Of flower and fruit, all increase of the year: Voiceless the river, in ice fretwork chained; Hushed the sweet cadences of bird and bee; Dumb the last echo to ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various
... that we must look for that spirit of morality, which is one of the chief merits of the book, makes one of the main joys of its perusal, and sets it high above more popular rivals. Athos, with the coming of years, has declined too much into the preacher, and the preacher of a sapless creed; but d'Artagnan has mellowed into a man so witty, rough, kind, and upright, that he takes the heart by storm. There is nothing of the copy-book about his virtues, nothing of the drawing-room in his fine, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... oft might this have been thy history! Thou hast cast off thy God,—might He not oft have "cast out" thee? Yes! cast thee out as fuel for the fire of His wrath,—a sapless, fruitless cumberer. And yet, notwithstanding all thine ungrateful requital for His unmerited forbearance, He is still declaring, "As I live, saith the Lord, I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth." Thy sins may be legion-like,—the sand of the sea may ...
— The Faithful Promiser • John Ross Macduff
... through the crook of Commines' arm, and still grasping the crumpled despatch, was the claw of a vulture. Above him, head and shoulders, towered Commines, square-set, burly, muscular, and as full of life and vigour as his master was sapless. Just midway to the threescore years and ten, his bodily powers were at their highest, and in the ten years he had served Louis his mind had ripened so that few men were more astute, more shrewd to see and seize upon advantages, whether for himself or his master. In the ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... general effect is good. It lessens the cost of distribution for the consumer, and it decides many to take to new and more hopeful courses, who otherwise might cling to a branch of business that had become nearly sapless. Underselling generally has the same results. When in a trade in which distribution usually costs 43 per cent., one man announces himself as willing to lessen this by 15 or 20 per cent., his conduct is apt to appear unbrotherly and selfish to the rest; but the fact is, that ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 445 - Volume 18, New Series, July 10, 1852 • Various
... that temp'rate Clime such difference make, If cited as the most Judicious take. October is my next, we hear in this The Northern winter-blasts begin to hip, In Scorpio resideth now the Sun, And his declining heat is almost done. The fruitless trees all withered now do stand, Whose sapless yellow leavs, by winds are fan'd Which notes when youth and strength have passed their prime Decrepit age must ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... of Lebanon, not in the great monarchs of the forest, but in the forlorn child of the desert did He abide. 'The goodwill of Him that dwelt in the bush' may dwell in you and me. Never mind how small, never mind how sapless, never mind how lightly esteemed among men, never mind though we make a very poor show by the side of the 'oaks of Bashan' or the 'cedars of Lebanon.' It is all right; the Fire does not dwell in them. 'Unto this man will I look, and with him will I dwell, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... why people always spoke of my friend Edmund Storm as a confirmed bachelor, considering the fact that he was not far on the shady side of thirty. It is true, he looked considerably older, and had to all appearances entered that bloomless and sapless period which with women is called "uncertain age." Nevertheless, I had a private conviction that Storm might some fine day shed this dry and shrunken chrysalis, and emerge in some brilliant and unexpected form. I cannot imagine what ground I had for such a belief; I only know that I ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... disorder, but a growth. There is spiritual as well as physical growth. Some men and women never grow up strong enough to love. Their development is arrested, or they are, from the beginning, poor creatures born of starvelings, and perhaps fated to give birth to pale, sapless beings like themselves. Others there are who love, and this is no ill chance, no disease of the mind and body calling for psychiater and physician. It is a strength, a becoming, a fulfilment. Let us reason from the effect to the cause. How does this ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... far below The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear The sapless foliage of the ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... forgive you as my heart forgives. Even as a vine that winds about an oak, Rot-struck and hollow-hearted, for support, Clasping the sapless branches as it climbs With tender tendrils and undoubting faith, I leaned upon your troth; nay, all my hopes— My love, my life, my very hope of heaven— I staked upon your solemn promises. I learned ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... edge of; dilute, impoverish; decimate; extenuate; reduce in strength, reduce the strength of; mettre de l'eau dans son vin [Fr.]. Adj. weak, feeble, debile^; impotent &c 158; relaxed, unnerved, &c v.; sapless, strengthless^, powerless; weakly, unstrung, flaccid, adynamic^, asthenic^; nervous. soft, effeminate, feminate^, womanly. frail, fragile, shattery^; flimsy, unsubstantial, insubstantial, gimcrack, gingerbread; rickety, creaky, creaking, cranky; craichy^; drooping, tottering &c v.. broken, lame, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... he, "was the hour that brought me to this country; yet not in search of you did I come, but of the mutable and ill-fated Belfield. Erring, yet ingenious young man! what a lesson to the vanity of talents, to the gaiety, the brilliancy of wit, is the sight of that green fallen plant! not sapless by age, nor withered by disease, but destroyed by want of pruning, and bending, breaking ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... unrepealed, which may be compared to a stately oak in the last stage of decay, or a magnificent building in ruins. Respect and admiration are due to both; and we should deem it profaneness to cut down the one, or demolish the other. But are we, therefore, to be sent to the sapless tree for may-garlands, or reproached for not making the mouldering ruin our place of abode? Government is essentially a matter of expediency; they who perceive this, and whose knowledge keeps pace with the changes of society, lament that, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... from the following description. He says they were a race of men who delighted to nibble at the superfluities and excrescences of books, which the learned at length observing, took warning of their own accord to lop the luxuriant, the rotten, the dead, the sapless, and the overgrown branches from their works. But now all this he cunningly shades under the following allegory: That the Nauplians in Argia learned the art of pruning their vines by observing that when an ass had browsed upon one of them, it thrived the better ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... with haft Of olive-wood inserted firm, and wrought With curious art. Then placing in his hand A polished adze, she led herself the way To her isle's utmost verge, where loftiest stood The alder, poplar, and cloud-piercing fir, Though sapless, sound, and fittest for his use, As buoyant most. To that most verdant grove His steps the beauteous nymph Calypso led, And sought her home again. Then slept not he, But, swinging with both hands the axe, his task Soon finished; trees full ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... hourly over a considerable stretch of time, where one is merely reading for entertainment, without thought or intention of preserving in the memory that which is read. It is a process which in the course of years dries all the juice out of a familiar verse of Scripture, leaving nothing but a sapless husk behind. In that case you at least know the origin of the husk, but in the case in point I apparently preserved the husk but presently forgot whence it came. It lay lost in some dim corner of my memory a year or two, then ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... foot, pushed out, and at last pushed off, by that tranquil movement from beneath, which is too slow to be seen, but too powerful to be arrested. One finds them always, but one rarely sees them fall. So it is our youth drops from us, —scales off, sapless and lifeless, and lays bare the tender and immature fresh growth of old age. Looked at collectively, the changes of old age appear as a series of personal insults and indignities, terminating at last in death, which Sir Thomas Browne has called ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... large flakes, which one may find lying at its foot, pushed out, and at last pushed off, by that tranquil movement from beneath, which is too slow to be seen, but too powerful to be arrested. One finds them always, but one rarely sees them fall. So it is our youth drops from us,— scales off, sapless and lifeless, and lays bare the tender and immature fresh growth of old age. Looked at collectively, the changes of old age appear as a series of personal insults and indignities, terminating at last ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... something else—that Christianity received into nature and life is only one of the elements of manhood—and that a man may become starved and mean and bigoted and essentially insane by feeding exclusively upon religion. What means the vision of these sapless, sad, and sanctimonious Christians—these poor, thin, stingy lives—but that all ideas save the religious one have been shut out from them? Is it not notorious that a minister who has fed exclusively upon religion is a man without power upon the hearts ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... as more fickle than the leaf was she, When it in autumn doth more sapless grow, And the old wind doth strip it from the tree, And doth before it in its fury ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... little, ragged, sapless thorn-bush, springing up and living its solitary life amidst the sands of the desert, it was not too humble to hold God; it was not too gross to burst into flame when He came; it was not too fragile to be gifted with undying being; like His that abode in it. And for us each the emblem may be true. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... sickly, sapless thorn, Which must, alas! no longer stand, Behold the cruel Dean in scorn Cuts down ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... wattles, standing Dead and sapless on the rise; When their boughs were full of beauty, Even to uncaring eyes, I was ever first to rifle The soft branches of their store. O the golden wealth of blossom I ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... A few frosted persimmons hung yet to their warty branches; the hulls of last autumn's black walnuts were beneath the spreading boughs; old orchards of peach-trees where the tints of green and bud smouldered in pink contrast to the oft-blackened and sapless branches, set off the purple beads of the haw on the bushes along the lanes. Fish-hawks, flying across the sky, felt the shadow of the flocks of wild ducks flying higher; and rabbits crossed the road so boldly in the face of Perry Whaley, that once a raccoon, limping across a cornfield ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... the possessions which fortune has heaped upon me, that I have one healthful faculty, one sense of enjoyment, among the hundred which other men are 'heirs to?' When did you ever see me for a moment happy? I live, as it were, on a rock, barren, and herbless, and sapless, and cut off from all human fellowship and intercourse. I had only a single object left to live for, when you saw me at Paris; I have gratified that, and the end and purpose of my existence is fulfilled. Heaven is merciful; but a little while, ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... noted above, between the knowledge and the power of a scenery hunter may be often seen illustrated in the fields of art. How common is the old sapless connoisseur in pictures, who retains his learned eye and his distinguished skill, but whose sensibilities are as dry as summer dust to the interests of the art. On the other hand, daily you see young ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... cheerily broke that morning sun upon the frosty and embossed panes of Gaffer Wiswall's dwelling; but the light brought no cheer, no solace unto him. The old man was now a withered, a sapless trunk, stripped of the green verdure which had lately bloomed on its hoary summit. His daughter, as he loved to call her—and he had almost cheated himself into the belief—was ravished from him, and the staff of ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... heads high in the air, who were nevertheless very ill qualified to win admiration for the caste to which they belonged. To state the simple truth, most of them were very ordinary commonplace personages, respectable, sapless, idealess—what Dr. Johnson would have characterized as exceedingly barren rascals. Some were of obscure origin, and would have been hard put to it if required to trace their ancestry beyond a single generation. Of these latter, a few, as has already been seen, had amassed wealth ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... is one of those who refuse to bow to the intolerable mandate of the dry and sapless spirit of "specialisation." He refuses to leave art to the artist, science to the scientist, religion to the theologian, or the delicate art of natural casuistry to the professional moralist. In the true humanistic temper he claims ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... their hollow sockets sink, Bereft of sleep, he loathes his meat and drink. He withers at his heart, and looks as wan As the pale spectre of a murder'd man: That pale turns yellow, and his face receives 530 The faded hue of sapless boxen leaves: In solitary groves he makes his moan, Walks early out, and ever is alone: Nor, mix'd in mirth, in youthful pleasures shares, But sighs when songs and instruments he hears. His spirits are so low, his voice is drown'd, He hears as from afar, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... knew so well, "when thou art at Rome do as thou seest," he asked Ricote for his bota and took aim like the rest of them, and with not less enjoyment. Four times did the botas bear being uplifted, but the fifth it was all in vain, for they were drier and more sapless than a rush by that time, which made the jollity that had been kept up ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... stupid eyes appears, For wanting nourishment, he wanted tears; His eyeballs in their hollow sockets sink, Bereft of sleep; he loathes his meat and drink; He withers at his heart, and looks as wan As the pale spectre of a murdered man: That pale turns yellow, and his face receives The faded hue of sapless boxen leaves; In solitary groves he makes his moan, Walks early out, and ever is alone; Nor, mixed in mirth, in youthful pleasure shares, But sighs when songs and ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... you, you could take her from him to-morrow, if you pleased. The greater your folly, because you do not. As for her, her foolishness is such that she would follow you to the ends of the earth—poor girl! she little knows what a pale, wretched, sapless thing you have in ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... by a zone of fire and steel. Her villas and homesteads flamed or smoked; her orchards flared heavenward in a torrent of sparks or stood black sapless trunks charred to their inmost pith; the promise of her harvests lay as grey ashes over the land. But her ramparts, though breached in places, were yet manned by her sons, and their assailants recoiled pierced by the shafts or stunned by the catapults of the defence. ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... called good society, and this is why the Drawer desires to turn the altruistic sentiment of the world upon it in this season, set apart by common consent for usefulness. Unfortunate are the fortunate if they are lifted into a sphere which is sapless of delicacy of feeling for its own. Is this an intangible matter? Take hospitality, for instance. Does it consist in astonishing the invited, in overwhelming him with a sense of your own wealth, or felicity, or family, or cleverness even; in trying to absorb him in your concerns, your successes, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... trailed his hand in the sea. It seemed to him unnaturally warm. He glanced up at the clouds. Heaven was blotted out. Was there a heaven? Last night he had thought there must be—but that was long ago. Was he sad? He scarcely knew. He was dull, as if the blood in him had run almost dry. He was like a sapless tree. Hermione and Maddalena—what were they? Shadows rather than women. He looked steadily at the sea. Was it the same element upon which he had been only a few hours ago under the stars with Maddalena? He could scarcely believe that it was the same. Sirocco had him fast, sirocco that ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... adapts itself to circumstances. And love—love dies. "Irreverence for the dreams of youth" soon creeps like a killing frost upon our hearts. The tender shoots and the expanding flowers are nipped and withered, and of a vine that yearned to stretch its tendrils round the world there is left but a sapless stump. ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... traveller is the elderly woman seated by her side. Perhaps—and perhaps not. For she seems a bit too dry and sapless and self-contained—as little susceptible, in fact, to the gentle dews of travel as an umbrella in a waterproof case. Moreover, it is doubtful if her bonnet would pass current beyond the national confines. ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... usurped and absorbed by the things that perish in the using. When you betake yourself to the word, to prayer, to communion, your heart, already searched, drained, scourged by the greedy roots of rank earthly lusts, is a sapless, impoverished, shrivelled thing, where faith in God and loving obedience to his law can no longer grow. Thus perish many bright promises; and high above the ruin, living and abiding for ever stands the word of Christ a witness against ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... melancholy desert where we meet, Resembleth well young Marius' restless thoughts. Here dreadful silence, solitary caves, No chirping birds with solace singing sweetly, Are harbour'd for delight; but from the oak, Leafless and sapless through decaying age, The screech-owl chants her fatal-boding lays. Within my breast care, danger, sorrow dwell; Hope and revenge sit hammering in my heart: The baleful babes of angry Nemesis Disperse their furious ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... about the real condition of the Ottoman Empire, and thought that with ten years of peace it might again become a respectable Power. "All that we hear about the decay of the Turkish Empire and its being a dead body or a sapless trunk, and so forth, is pure and unadulterated nonsense." Bulwer's ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... in the fiercer strife Which winter brings to me amain, Sapless, I waste my life, And, murmuring at ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... parade of themselves and spend lavishly. An ill-understood system of culture had diverted them from their natural avocations, and converted them into showy and agreeable specimens of vegetation, often hollow, blighted, sapless and over-pruned, besides being very costly, over-manured and too freely watered; and the skillful gardening which shaped, grouped and arranged them in artificial forms and bouquets, rendered their fruit abortive ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... sockets grind, Like gibbets creaking to the passing wind; Whose shrivell'd skin with much adhesion clings His bones around in hard compacted rings, If veins there were, no blood beneath could force, Unless by miracle, its trickling course;— Yet even he within that sapless frame, A mind sustained that climb'd the steeps of fame. Such is the form by mystic Heaven design'd, The earthly mansion of the rarest mind. But, mark his gratitude. This soul sublime, This soul lord paramount o'er space and ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... O World! in thine insanity Thou sinkest Soul into a poor buffoon, Garbed in tinsel and false ornament To play its antics on the stage of life, A thing for fools to laugh at in their mirth. Thou sat'st thy lust upon the sapless husks That strew the highways of this pilgrimage, Closing thine eyes unto their emptiness, And out of folly turning sour to sweet. Hast thou the joy that nature's converse sheds Thro' all the pulses of the ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... Bleriot-type machines, and trying to build an eight-cylinder V motor. All these things had Bagby given for the good of the game, expecting no profit in return. He was one of the real martyrs of aviation, this sapless, oldish man, never knowing the joy of the air, yet devoting a lifetime of ability to helping man sprout wings ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... time, he was battling only for himself. The people had no part nor interest in the contest. Without a common sympathy to bind them together, was it strange that they should fall off from him, like leaves in winter, and leave him exposed, a bare and sapless trunk, to the fury of ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... Life! To be abus'd by an old Withered Hag! I have no patience when I think of it: A dirty homely Joan! For my part, I admire how thou coud'st love her: She frets, I'll warrant you, because she lies alone: But who that is not Mad, wou'd lie with such a sapless piece of wither'd Flesh as she, when he may lie by such a one as I, that's sweet, and fresh, plump, brisk and airy, and that's full of Juice, just in the Bloom of all my Youth and Beauty. But if to this thou still prefer'st thy Dowd; take her for me, ...
— The London-Bawd: With Her Character and Life - Discovering the Various and Subtle Intrigues of Lewd Women • Anonymous
... Calypso gave him an axe with a handle of olive wood, and an adze, and took him to the end of the island, where there were great trees, long ago sapless and dry, alder and poplar and pine. Of these he felled twenty, and lopped them and worked them by the line. Then the goddess brought him an auger, and he made holes in the logs and joined them with pegs. And he made decks and side planking also; also a mast and a yard, ...
— The Story Of The Odyssey • The Rev. Alfred J. Church
... found that our horses and sheep were falling off so much in condition, from the scarcity of grass, and its dry and sapless quality, that it became absolutely necessary for us to remove elsewhere; I had already had all our surplus stores and baggage headed up in casks, or packed in cases, and carefully buried (previously covered over with a tarpaulin and with bushes ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... a stinking smoke. Achilles' sceptre was of wood, Like Sid's, but nothing near so good; Though down from ancestors divine Transmitted to the heroes line; Thence, thro' a long descent of kings, Came an HEIRLOOM,[6] as Homer sings. Though this description looks so big, That sceptre was a sapless twig, Which, from the fatal day, when first It left the forest where 'twas nurs'd, As Homer tells us o'er and o'er, Nor leaf, nor fruit, nor blossom bore. Sid's sceptre, full of juice, did shoot In golden boughs, and golden fruit; And he, the dragon never ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... hearts, and still thrust this famine-stricken fraud upon us? I ask him if he can think of our desolate state, of our past sorrows, of our dark future, and still unpityingly foist upon us this wreck, this ruin, this tottering swindle, this gnarled and blighted and sapless vagabond from Oregon's ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... chesnut which spreads its branches before the whole south side of the chateau, and which is so ancient that they tell me the hollow of its trunk will hold a dozen men. Your enthusiasm will scarcely contend that there can be either use, or beauty, in such a sapless old tree as this.' ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... many Christian men so little joy in their lives? Because they look for it in all sorts of wrong places, and seek to wring it out of all sorts of sapless and dry things. 'Do men gather grapes of thorns?' If you fling the berries of the thorn into the winepress, will you get sweet sap out of them? That is what you are doing when you take gratified earthly affections, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren |
