The cleared places lay red and baking under the hot August sun; the trees seemed crisp and sapless.

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.

How miserable, in comparison, is the present sapless age, with its prudery and its pedantry, and its periwigs and its painted coaches, and its urban Arcadias and the florid impotence and ostentatious inanity of what it calls its art!

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.

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.

In spite of his dignity, rank, age, and services, he could hope for no favor or indulgence from that morose woman in whose sapless bosom no compassion for the Protestants ever found admission, and still less from those cruel, mercenary, bigoted prelates whom she selected for her ministers.

Adj. dry, anhydrous, arid; adust^, arescent^; dried &c v.; undamped; juiceless^, sapless; sear; husky; rainless, without rain, fine; dry as a bone, dry as dust, dry as a stick, dry as a mummy, dry as a biscuit.

This, the most repellant, sapless food to be found in the world, had been their diet for some time.

Yet even he within that sapless frame, A mind sustained that climb'd the steeps of fame.

A breeze would send the sapless walnut-leaves whirling through the air, but there is no breeze; Nature seems to hold her breath as she thinks of the dead whom she has gathered to her earthy breast.

His tardy literary schemes, toofruit of his all but sapless senilityhave absorbed more and more of his time and attention.

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:

Below, all their earthward-looking branches are sapless and shattered, splintered by the weight of many winters' snows; above, they are still green and full of life, but their summits overtop all the deciduous trees around them, and in their companionship with heaven they are alone.

Those who, in elementary treatises, have meddled much with philological controversy, have well illustrated the couplet of Denham: "The tree of knowledge, blasted by disputes, Produces sapless leaves in stead of fruits.

" "If the bee, eager to sip, always seeks the juices of new growths, this is the fault of the sapless flowers, not of the bee.

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.

"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.

"It stretches out its bare and sapless branches," says Mr. Jesse, "like the skeleton arms of some enormous giant, and is almost fearful in its decay."

Yet that great soul our novelists impeach; 40 Too much manuring fill'd that field with weeds, While sects, like locusts, did destroy the seeds; The tree of knowledge, blasted by disputes, Produces sapless leaves instead of fruits; Proud Greece all nations else barbarians held, Boasting her learning all the world excell'd.

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.

"Perhaps Father Pedro is right, and this young twig of the Church is as dry and sapless as himself.

Her slight knowledge of Spanish was barely sufficient to make her wants known, so that the relief of conversation with her only companion was debarred her, and she was obliged to content herself with the sapless, crackling smiles and withered genuflexions that the old woman dropped like dead leaves in her path.

" "That's it," returned Mr. Nott thoughtfully, plucking at his bushy whiskers with his fingers and thumb as if he were removing dead and sapless incumbrances in their growth, "that's just what it isthem's ez in it themselves don't pay, and them ez haz left their goodsthe goods don't pay.

Sapless doctrines doth rehearse, And the milk of falsehoods acrid, Burns our babe-lips like a curse, Cling we must to godless prophets, as the suckling to the nurse.