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'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, worldly competence, fulfilled ambitions, and put them into the press, and think that out of these you can squeeze the wine of gladness. No! No! brethren, dry and sapless and juiceless they all are.
We tossed to the fish humbugs of wool, silk, and feathers, gauds such as captivate the greedy or the guileless. Again the "gobemouches" trout, the fellows on the look-out for novelty, dashed up and swallowed disappointing juiceless morsels, and with them swallowed hooks.
There be those to hint captiously that they find it an affair of false seeming; that the gorgeous colouring is a mere trick of shop-window cunning; that the time is juiceless and devoid of all but the specious delights of surface. Yet these, perhaps, are unduly imaginative for a world where any satisfaction is held by a tenure precarious at best.
He filled the blackened ruin of a pipe, shaking in his palsied fingers, clasped it in mumbling, toothless gums: he was so sere, so juiceless, that the smoke trailing from his sunken lips might well have been the spontaneous conflagration of his desiccated interior. "Hollidew's a terrible man for money," he continued, "it hurts him like a cut with a hick'ry to see a dollar go.
The meat of the last bullock was very hard and juiceless, and something was to be done to soften it, and make it palatable: as we had no fat, we frequently steamed it with water, but this rendered it tough, without facilitating in the least the mastication; and its fibres, entering between our teeth, rendered them exceedingly tender, and caused us much pain.
Everybody knows the type of Yankee produced by this climate and diet: thin, as if he had been split and dried; with an ashen kind of complexion, like the tint of the food he is made of; and about as sharp, tough, juiceless, and biting to deal with as the other is to the taste.
At times, no doubt, one is painfully aware of his erudition, painfully aware that he is applying principles learned from Beethoven and Bach, manipulating his music out of no inner necessity. At times, his music does smell of the lamp. And yet, how completely those juiceless moments are outbalanced by the mass of his living, fragrant, robust song! With what rareness the pedant in Brahms emerges!
Then came those fruits, the funeral feast of the year, mulberries and walnuts; the tasteless, juiceless walnut; the dark mulberry, juicy but severe, and mouldy withal, as gathered not from the tree, but from the damp earth. And thus that green spot itself weaned them from the love of it. Charles looked around him, and rose to depart as a conviva satur.
The smilax, also, with its thorns, its pugnacious habit, and its stony, juiceless berries, a sort of handsome vixen among vines, the smilax, which can climb though it cannot stand erect, has little occasion to lord it over the strawberry. If one has done nothing, or worse than nothing, it is hardly worth while to boast of the original fashion in which he has gone about it.
Under their feet was the low-clinging sheep-sage and the running herbs of yellow and gray which seemed so juiceless and dry to the eye, but which were the provender of thousands of sheep and cattle that never knew the shelter of fold or stable, nor the taste of man-grown grain or fodder, from the day of their birth to the day of their marketing.
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