[f. BRUSH sb.1]
1. Cut or broken twigs or branches; small wood.
1637. Bury Wills (1850), 169. I owe Danyell Whitacre … for three loades of brushe wood.
1783. Cowper, Task, IV. 381. Her scanty stock of brushwood, blazing clear.
1818. Hawthorne, Amer. Note-bks. (1879), II. 44. A load of dry brushwood.
fig. a. 1613. Overbury, Newes Chimney Corn., Wks. (1856), 199. Wit is brushwood, judgement timber: the one gives the greatest flame, the other yeelds the durablest heat.
1649. G. Daniel, Trinarch., Hen. V., ccxx. Lopt Royaltie, is ever to the Bold Attemptor, worth his pains; the Brush-wood’s gold.
1682. Dryden, Relig. Laici, 269. Vain traditions stopped the gaping fence … What safety from such brushwood helps as these?
2. Small growing trees and shrubs; thicket, underwood.
1732. Berkeley, Alciphr., I. § 2. Land that is suffered to lie waste … will be overspread with brush-wood, brambles, thorns.
1814. Scott, Wav., xxxvi. Little dingles of stunted brushwood.
1835. W. Irving, Tour Prairies, 235. They all three made off … through thickets and brushwood.
attrib. 1855. W. H. Russell, The War, xxviii. 250. Sanguinary hand-to-hand fights, of despairing rallies, of desperate assaults—in glens and valleys, in brushwood glades and remote dells, hidden from all human eyes.
