"Clod" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thing, master,' said the landlord, and was about to trudge onward; when the guest, detaining him, said, in a strong Scottish tone, 'Ya will maybe have nae whey then, nor buttermilk, nor ye couldna exhibit a souter's clod?' ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... at the funeral obsequies of the first. Grace and I sobbed as if our hearts would break, the whole time we were in the church; and my poor, sensitive, nervous little sister actually shrieked as she heard the sound of the first clod that fell upon the coffin. Our mother was spared that trying scene, finding it impossible to support it. She remained at home, on her knees, most of the day on which the ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... and got behind his guard some ten feet away from Greer. The Englishman's fine-grained stomach was covered with pink welts from his punishment. He had ceased smiling and was watching his man carefully. As a matter of fact, he had expected to dispose of Greer easily—as a gentleman disposes of a clod-hopper. But the heavy-set boy's method of fighting was new and effective. Likewise there seemed to be a certain ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... pinch of thy wild dust, Blown back to flame, would set our world on fire; Thy face amid our timid counsels thrust Would light us back to glory and desire, And swords flash forth that now ignobly rust; Maenad and Muse, upon thy lips of flame. Madness too wise might kiss a clod to fame. ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... blessed. They are to feel, even in the event of possible recovery, a repugnance to touching this earthly, hard, impenetrable soil. A wonderful elasticity is to be imparted to them, by which they spurn from under them the clod of earth which hitherto attracted them. And so, through a brilliant cycle of equally holy acts, the beauty of which we have only briefly hinted at, the cradle and the grave, however far asunder they may chance to be, are joined in one ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... been used before (line 512) "nac eithaf na chynor." A "clod heb or heb eithaf," simply means ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin
... for whom thy ceaseless thought Is as the sun, that warms the earthy clod Into a flush of blossom beauty-fraught, Waking in hearts by poverty distraught Glimpses in life of Heaven ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... catches at a lifebelt. "The children! That's just the root of the whole intolerable situation. This hasn't been a home for the last three or four years; it's been nothing but a nursery. And about all I've been is a retriever for a creche, a clod-hopper to tiptoe about the sacred circle and see to it there's enough flannel to cover their backs and enough food to put into their stomachs. I'm an accident, of course, an intruder to be faced with fortitude and ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... ma'am," rejoined the incensed scribe; "and moreover I say, that the old miserly clod-breaker called me pettifogger—pettifogger, ma'am—and said I came to hunt for a job, ma'am—which I have no more right to have said to me than any other gentleman of my profession, ma'am—especially as I am clerk to the peace, having and ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... known as Plez, his whole name being Pleasant Valley, an inspiration to his mother from the label on a grape box, which had drifted into that region from the North. He had just stooped to pick up a clod of earth with which to accentuate his vociferations, when, on rising, he was astounded by the apparition of an elderly woman wearing a purple sun-bonnet, and carrying a furled umbrella of the same color. Behind the spectacles, which were fixed upon him, blazed a pair ...
— The Late Mrs. Null • Frank Richard Stockton
... not what thou art, But know that thou and I must part; And when or how or where we met, I own to me's a secret yet. But this I know, when thou art fled, Where'er they lay these limbs, this head, No clod so valueless shall be, As all that then remains of me. O whither, whither dost thou fly, Where bend unseen thy trackless course, And in this strange divorce, Ah, tell where I must seek this compound I? To the vast ocean of empyreal flame, From ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... a curse. "You white-livered clod!" he cried. "Who is running this scheme? You or I? Who delivers the whiskey to the Indians? And who pays you your money? I do the thinking for this outfit. I didn't come down here to ask you to run this consignment. I came here to tell you to do it. This thing of playing safe is ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... enshrined a transcendant power, whose intents, words, and actions were worthy to be recorded in letters of gold; now the superstition of affection alone could give value to the shattered mechanism, which, incapable and clod-like, no more resembled Raymond, than the fallen rain is like the former mansion of cloud in which it climbed the highest skies, and gilded by the sun, attracted all eyes, and satiated the sense by ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... sympathize and condole with you," he said to the old man. The Quaker shook his head, and after that there was silence between them till they parted. To the few others who were there Lord Hampstead did not address himself, nor did they to him. From the grave, when the clod of earth had been thrown on it, he walked slowly away, without a sign on his face of that agony which was rending his heart. There was a carriage there to take him to the railway, but he only shook ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... of a giant of the forest. A man does not become an Angel by the mere fact of dying and entering a new world any more than an animal advances to be a man by the same process. But in time all that lives, mounts the ladder of Being from the clod to the God. There is no limitation possible to the spirit, and so at various stages in its unfoldment the Human Spirit works with the other nature forces, according to the stage of intelligence which it ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... a certain force upon Jim Bowles. He stepped on the faster, tripped upon a clod and stumbled, spilling half ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... introduction in these words: "And now, gentlemen, we have a farmer as our guest here tonight. It has been the plaint of the farmer from time out of mind that he had not representation; that he had not voice in affairs that had to do with his vocation. The newly made clod-hopper is respectfully informed that he can air his grievances to the fullest extent and that, unlike others, we will not pass resolutions of acquiescence in his views and then repudiate them. We will file them in our archives as ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... have her," he cried, striking a blow with his stick at a clod in front of him. And he at once began to consider the political part of the ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... numerous, but less fortunate fellow citizens. There balloons went up by day, and rockets and bombs by night, and there, too, the brave militia went on parade. To Mr. White we owe the preservation of a poetical description written by Frederick Cozzens in an imitation of Spenser's "Sir Clod ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... he should go to the fence and look over, or simply accept the phenomenon as one of those things which no fellow can understand, there popped up before him the head and shoulders of a girl. Poised in her right hand was a third clod, which, seeing that there was now no need for its services, she allowed to fall to ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... the morning sky! O wonder of the moonlit sea! O life—the vision and the cry Into eternity!— Eternity beneath, on high, Veiled within cloud and clod, That life in folly would vainly fly Through the nethermost deep, through the uttermost high,— Life that is God-doomed never to die ...
— Iolaeus - The man that was a ghost • James A. Mackereth
... no time like Spring, Like Spring that passes by; There is no life like Spring-life born to die,— Piercing the sod, Clothing the uncouth clod, Hatched in the nest, Fledged on the windy bough, Strong on the wing: There is no time like Spring that passes by, Now newly born, and ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... religion. The origin of this act among the people of Tuscany, is related by Cicero in the following manner: "A peasant," says he, "ploughing in the field, his ploughshare running pretty deep in the earth, turned up a clod, from whence sprung a child, who taught him and the other Tuscans the art of divination." (Cicero, De Divinat. l. 2.) This fable, undoubtedly means no more, than that this child, said to spring from the clod of earth, was a youth of a very mean and obscure ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... "I'm afraid that I must conclude that her unchivalrous clod of a husband has indeed stooped to ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... may Jupiter and all the Deities confound you; you stink of garlick, you filth unmistakeable, you clod, you he-goat, you pig-sty, you mixture ...
— The Captiva and The Mostellaria • Plautus
... considered as concrete; among some Hindus promises are tied up in knots of cloth, and when they are discharged the knots are untied. Mr. S.C. Roy says of the Oraons: "Contracts are even to this day generally not written but acted. Thus a lease of land is made by the lessor handing over a clod of earth (which symbolises land) to the lessee; a contract of sale of cattle is entered into by handing over to the buyer a few blades of grass (which symbolise so many heads of cattle); a contract of payment of bride-price ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... Torment and death! break head and brain at once, To be deliver'd of your fighting issue. Who can endure to see blind Fortune dote thus? To be enamour'd on this dusty turf, This clod, a whoreson puck-fist! O G——! I could run wild with grief now, to behold The rankness of her bounties, that doth breed Such bulrushes; these mushroom gentlemen, That shoot up in a ...
— Every Man Out Of His Humour • Ben Jonson
... now. God's time is 12.25. Tell mother you'll be there. Rush your order and you play a slick ace. Join on right here. Book through to eternity junction, the nonstop run. Just one word more. Are you a god or a doggone clod? If the second advent came to Coney Island are we ready? Florry Christ, Stephen Christ, Zoe Christ, Bloom Christ, Kitty Christ, Lynch Christ, it's up to you to sense that cosmic force. Have we cold ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... his panting horses browse Their shelt'ring canopy of pendent boughs; Till rest, delicious, chase each transient pain, And new-born vigour swell in every vein. Hour after hour, and day to day succeeds; Till every clod and deep-drawn furrow spreads To crumbling mould; a level surface clear, And strew'd with corn to crown the rising year; And o'er the whole Giles once transverse again, In earth's moist bosom buries up the grain. ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... and far, Stealing down from moon and star, Kindled in that human clod Thought of ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... of jubilation to find that the majority of Australian men are with us, because in the vote they have furnished us with a means of redress," and Carry finished her previously prepared speech by throwing a clod ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... was a very slow fellow, certainly, and went among men for a clod, and a muff, and a milksop, and a slowcoach, and a bloke, and a boodle, and so forth. And very little he did, for many years: but what he did, he never ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... down the passage came clod, clod, clod, And when he opened the door, He croaked so harsh, 'twas as much as she could To keep from laughing the more, the more, To ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume II. • Walter de la Mare
... emerald, and others? They are nothing more than crystallized clay or sand, with a trifling quantity of metallic oxide or rust, which gives to each one its peculiar color. Yet, what a difference between these sparkling and costly jewels and the shapeless clod or sand which we ...
— The Happiness of Heaven - By a Father of the Society of Jesus • F. J. Boudreaux
... the spirit, Gieszet hinein! The life of the bowl; Leben dem Leben Man is an earth-clod Gibt er allein. Unwarmed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... "Some clod of a mathematician," explained Kenny with contempt, "whom the bank employs to insult its patrons. Look here, Garry! Look at that balance. Over a thousand dollars. Do you wonder I told him he had a sense of humor when he said I was overdrawn? The ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... ground—walking so slowly, and with his lean frame so bent that I might have supposed him ill if I had not remarked the steady movement of his head from right to left, and the alert touch with which he now and again displaced a clod of earth or a cluster of leaves. By-and-by he rose stiffly, and looked round him suspiciously; but by that time I had slipped behind a trunk, and was not to be seen; and after a brief interval he went back to his task, stooping over it more closely, ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... for fear of the falling roof. Scarcely had she paused, however, when a great crash came, followed by a long mingled sound of many stones and much earth falling. It seemed as if the whole roof must be coming down. A shower of damp soil descended upon her head, and one clod larger than the rest knocked her over. Happily she was more stunned and frightened than hurt. The glimmer of light had disappeared, and she began to realise that the door must have shut. Terrible as her position was, the ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... gardens yield, High sheltering woods and wa's maun shield But thou, beneath the random bield O' clod or stane, Adorns the histie stibble ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... so rare as a day in June? Then, if ever, come perfect days; Then Heaven tries the earth if it be in tune, 35 And over it softly her warm ear lays: Whether we look, or whether we listen, We hear life murmur, or see it glisten; Every clod feels a stir of might, An instinct within it that reaches and towers, 40 And, grasping blindly above it for light, Climbs to a soul for grass and flowers; The flush of life may well be seen Thrilling back over hills and valleys; The cowslip startles in meadows green, 45 The buttercup catches the ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson
... certain knowledge, arise in Kendal, Wakefield, Bradford and Leeds; huge men, by thousands, amongst the spinners and weavers of Glasgow, Paisley, etc., well able to fight their way through battalions of clod-hoppers whose talk is of oxen. But, unless in times subject to special distress, it is not so easy to tempt away the weaver from his loom as the delver from his spade. We believe the reason to be, that the monotony of a rustic life is more oppressive to those who have ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... comfortable home and clothes that she could feel she had earned. She had come full of youth and spirit and hope. Youth and hope and spirit had dribbled away, but she had stayed, and stayed. To-day she wished she had married any clod in her native village that had been good enough to address her. Never for one moment had she known the joys of freedom, of ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... ancient channels bring their streams, The soft mud fries beneath the scorching sun; And midst the fresh-turn'd earth unnumber'd forms The tiller finds: some scarcely half conceiv'd; Imperfect some, their bodies wanting limbs: And oft he beings sees with parts alive, The rest a clod of earth: for where with heat Due moisture kindly mixes, life will spring: From these in concord all things are produc'd. Though fire with water strives; yet vapour warm, Discordant mixture, gives ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... the night after she had gone to bed, she could feel her cheek burn at the recollection that this 'ignorant clod,' as she contemptuously called him to herself, had the power to make her feel a weak, undisciplined child by ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... mountain had been precipitated into the depths of the sea, my companion quitted me, and there was an end of my dream; for what with the noise made by the fiends, and the agitation which I felt at losing my companion, I awoke from my sleep, and returned with the utmost reluctance to my sluggish clod, thinking how noble and delightful it was to be a free spirit, to wander about in angelic company, quite secure, though seemingly in the midst of peril. I had now nothing to console me, save the Muse, and she ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... not know if bygone knightly strain Impelled you then, or blood of humble clod Defied the dread adventure to attain The cross of honor ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... of death, with but sense and sensibility left to breathe a last aspiration to Heaven of blessing upon their country, may we not humbly hope that to them too it was a pledge of transition from gloom to glory, and that while their mortal vestments were sinking into the clod of the valley their emancipated spirits were ascending to ...
— State of the Union Addresses of John Quincy Adams • John Quincy Adams
... that can arise from the grave—'implora pace'[2] I hope whoever may survive me, and shall see me put in the foreigners' burying-ground at the Lido, within the fortress by the Adriatic, will see those two words, and no more put over me. I trust they won't think of 'pickling and bringing me home to Clod or Blunderbuss Hall.' I am sure my bones would not rest in an English grave, or my clay mix with the earth of that country. I believe the thought would drive me mad on my death-bed, could I suppose that any of my friends would be base enough ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 471, Saturday, January 15, 1831 • Various
... father those rumpled vellum documents, since the departure of which the squire had never had a happy day; nay, something to come forth again to his friends as a gay, young country squire, instead of as a farmer, clod-compelling for his bread. We would not have him thought to be better than he was, nor would we wish him to make him of other stuff than nature generally uses. His heart did exult at Mary's wealth; but it leaped higher still when he thought ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... and cut off large weeds. Another indispensable tool in a large vineyard is a one-horse grape-hoe, to supplement the work of which there must be heavy hand-hoes. Very often the surface soil must be pulverized, and a clod-crusher, roller or a float becomes a necessity. A full complement of bright, sharp tools at the command of the grape-grower goes far toward ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... turned up a clod of earth with something sticking on it, and Ben sprang forward to ...
— Harper's Young People, June 22, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... so I did not insist farther, and went up to the easel. I was not an artist nor a critic, nor in any way qualified to be a judge of painting as painting; but of genius, who is not a judge? In any art it is recognisable, patent, obvious to all. There is no human clod, no boor who is utterly insensible to its influence. It needs no education to perceive its presence, though the ignorant could not tell you what that presence was. Genius is as the sun itself: as universally perceptible. Even ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... truth has in his eyes almost the elements of a religion. With growing knowledge his power of sympathy is enlarged; until like Saint Francis, he can call the sun his brother and the moon his sister; can grieve with homeless winds, and feel a kinship with the clod. The very agonies by which his soul has been wrung open to his gaze visions of truth which else he had never caught, and so he finds even in things evil some touch of goodness. Praise and blame are for children, but to him impertinent. He is tolerant of absurdity ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... to descend, yet fearing still more to stay; when, luckily for our poor little mouse, some one called the dog, who instantly ran off; and Downy, darting from the stack, had just time to gain a place of security beneath a clod of earth, where she lay shaking with fear, not daring to look up for ...
— Little Downy - The History of A Field-Mouse • Catharine Parr Traill
... ye tears! that have long refused to flow, Ye are welcome to my heart—thawing, thawing, like the snow; I feel the hard clod soften, and the early snowdrops spring, And the healing fountains ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... Cothrob, king of the subterranean world, and supreme chief of Ginnistan. I and my brethren are of those who, created out of the pure elementary fire, disdained, even at the command of Omnipotence, to do homage to a clod of earth, because it was called Man. Thou mayest have heard of us as cruel, unrelenting, and persecuting. It is false. We are by nature kind and generous; only vengeful when insulted, only cruel when affronted. We are true to those who trust us; and we have heard the invocations of thy father, the ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... top o' t' clod, Thy heead cocked o' one side, Lookin' as far-learnt as a judge. Is that a worrm thou's spied? By t' Megs! he's well-nigh six inch lang, An' reed as t' gate i' t' park; If thou don't mesh him up a bit, He'll gie ...
— Songs of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... argumentatively, "of what real value is the moss to the stone, except in the picturesque aspect? Do you know that a great many of these time revered and honored adages are the greatest humbugs in the world?" asked the audacious young iconoclast. "Who wants to be a stone or a clod, or even a bit of velvet moss? They go to make up the world, it is true; but is that narrow, torpid, insensate life any pattern for human souls and active bodies? I think a man's business in this world is to find out new ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... dregs, the scum of pool or clod, God-spawn of lizard-footed clans, And those dog-headed hulks that trod Swart necks of the old Egyptians, Raw draughts of man's ...
— A Channel Passage and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... age (she must have been more than a hundred and thirty years old), she had not sufficient understanding or judgment to penetrate into the things of God. I had her conveyed to the village with great care, and they brought me a clod of clay, which had only a little perception, and hardly any understanding; sight had forsaken her, and her hearing was very dull. She had no more power of motion than a stone, for wherever they placed ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, - Volume XIII., 1604-1605 • Ed. by Blair and Robertson
... "When clod-hoppers and such scum mingle with their betters," he bawled out, "one of us must retire from the foul contamination. But this I tell you, the first of you that budges, or even growls, I'll break every ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... with irony: "My dear Kapellmeister, I am not as those who would serve Art with a bottle of champagne under each arm. I want no fumes in my brain and no clod between my fingers when I meet the ...
— The Black Cross • Olive M. Briggs
... as whether we be the outcasts of a blind idiot called Nature,[2] or the children of an All wise and Infinitely Good God!—whether we spend a few miserable years on this earth, and then sink into a clod of the valley; or endure the anxieties of mortal life, only to fit us for the enjoyment of immortal happiness! These subjects are unworthy a philosopher's investigation! He deems that there is a certain self- evidence in Infidelity, and becomes an Atheist by intuition. Well did ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... merchant, whose finest fancies are given to the condition of the money-market, who governs his actions by a decline of Erie, and narrows his ideas down to the requirements of filthy lucre, like a mere 'wintry clod of earth'! Ay, poor Clarian, poor anybody, when we wake from our bright youth-dream and tread the rough pathway of a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... a duly registered virgin. And in this time of need, the magic of my blood must not be profaned." She twisted sidewise, and then turned toward the door, avoiding him. Before she reached it, the door opened to show a dull clod, entirely naked, holding up a ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... him to LOOK so. He shall do just as he is bidden, but he shall carry himself like the man and monarch he was made to be. Let him stay where he is put, yet not as if he were put there, but as if he had taken his position deliberately. But, of all things, to have a man act as if he were a clod just emerged for the first time from his own barnyard! Upon this occasion, however, I was too much absorbed in my errand to note anybody's demeanor, and I threaded straightway the crowd of customers, went up to the counter, and inquired ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... cow-calves, a low phaeton, a gig, two ricks of hay." In this fashion were proclaimed in odious details all those comfortable additions to a gentleman's house in the country, with which the archdeacon was so well acquainted. Only last November he had recommended his son to buy a certain clod-crusher, and the clod-crusher had of course been bought. The bright blue paint upon it had as yet not given way to the stains of the ordinary farmyard muck and mire;—and here was the clod-crusher advertised for sale! The archdeacon did not want his son to leave Cosby Lodge. He knew well enough ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... companion of his life—no such feeling, for instance, as I have for you at this moment. Well, I married you and we lived together as happily as most young couples do. I knew that I had a good wife, and you didn't know, or even suspect, what a brainless, heartless clod you had for your husband. Our married life glided by without anything particular happening to disturb it. But the thing became monotonous to me, and I had the senseless vagabond's desire for change. We did fairly well on the farm, ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... which at once brought Jupp upstairs. Joe the gardener still stopped, however, on the mat below in the passage, as nothing short of a peremptory command from the vicar would have constrained him to put his heavy clod-hopping boots on the soft stair-carpet. Indeed, it had needed all Mary's persuasion to make him come into the hall, which he did as gingerly as a cat treading on ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson
... deposited, and which is very rich in certain constituents of the tobacco-plant and is especially conducive to its growth. The ploughmen then come and break up the ground, hoers carefully pulverize every clod, and the seed is sown, a mere handful being sufficient for a great extent of soil. The laborers afterward cover the surface of the patch with bushes, and it is left without further protection. In a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... die, and go we know not where, To lie in cold obstruction and to rot: This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit To bathe in fiery floods or to reside In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice, To be imprisoned in the viewless winds, And blown with restless violence round about The pendent world; or to be worse than worst ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... was understood by men, the shocked aristocracy let their canvasbacks grow cold and their burgundy stand untasted. With horrified voice they commanded "No!" The United States Senate had been ever reserved for gentlemen, and Patrick Henry Hanway was a clod. The fiat went forth; Patrick Henry Hanway should not go to the Senate; a wide-eyed patrician wonder was abroad that he should have had the insolent temerity to harbor such a dream—he who was of the social reptilia and could not show an ancestor who ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... clouds and dreams I felt those souls In the abyss, each fire hid in its clod, From which in clouds and dreams the spirit rolls Into ...
— By Still Waters - Lyrical Poems Old and New • George William Russell
... dog-stealers and gin-drinkers, such as their parents were; and the child of the average English tradesman or peasant, even at this day, well schooled, will show no innate disposition such as must fetter him forever to the clod or the counter. You say that many a boy runs away, or would run away if he could, from good positions to go to sea. Of course he does. I never said I should have any difficulty in finding sailors, but I shall in finding fishmongers. I am at no loss for gardeners either, but ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... me; then I tried clods till I was all tired out, but I never got one. It was because I am left-handed and cannot throw good. Even when I aimed at the one I wasn't after I couldn't hit the other one, though I did make some close shots, for I saw the black blot of the clod sail right into the midst of the golden clusters forty or fifty times, just barely missing them, and if I could have held out a little longer maybe I could ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... again he introduces Love and Death, who dispute concerning him; for, like Dante and all the nobler souls of Italy, he is much occupied with thoughts of the grave, and his true mistress is death; death at first as the worst of all sorrows and disgraces, with a clod of the field for its brain; afterwards, death in its high distinction, its detachment from vulgar needs, the angry stains of life and action ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... expect to see nighthawks squatted on them, wholly indifferent to the lamentations of lost souls. We go directly under the branch where one of them is sitting ten feet above and still he makes no sign. We throw a clod, but yet there is no movement of his wings. Not till a stick hits the limb close to where he is sitting does he stretch his long wings with their telltale white spots and fly rapidly away. And the other two sit unmoved. But some night we hear the whirr of the nighthawk's wings as he ...
— Some Spring Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... I will none of him—the dull clod, who is called the son of Pharaoh. Moreover, he is my half-brother, and it is not meet that I should wed my brother. For nature cries aloud against the ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
... not necessary that boys and girls be taught any less than they are taught now. They should receive more practical knowledge than they do now, without a doubt, and less of that which is simply ornamental, but they cannot know too much. An intelligent gardener is better than a clod-hopper, and an educated nurse is better than an ignorant one; but if the gardener and the nurse have been spoiled for their business and their condition, by the sentiments which they have imbibed with their knowledge, they are made uncomfortable to themselves, and to those whom they ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... neighbor's son's nose and take him into your house.' It would be a pretty business, truly, to marry our Mary to some great count or knight, who, when the fancy takes him, would look upon her as some strange thing, and be calling her country-wench, clod-breaker's brat, and I know not what else. No, not while I live, husband; I have not brought up my child to be so used. Do you provide money, Sancho, and leave the matching of her to my care; for there is Lope Tocho, ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... offspring, would torment me With cruel expectation. Yet one doubt Pursues me still, lest all I cannot die; Lest that pure breath of life, the spirit of Man Which God inspired, cannot together perish With this corporeal clod; then, in the grave, Or in some other dismal place, who knows But I shall die a living death? O thought Horrid, if true! Yet why? It was but breath Of life that sinned; what dies but what had life And ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... had been called a "Clod hopper." As he read the following, he wondered whether or not Uncle Zed had not also been so designated, and had written this ...
— Dorian • Nephi Anderson
... reflection; of Sir Thomas's second daughter, as, with a clatter of stones, she and the colt dropped into a road, and charged on over the bank on the other side, the colt leaving a hind leg behind him in it, and sending thereby a clod of earth flying into the stranger's face. The stranger only laughed, and catching hold of the much enduring hireling he drove him level with the colt, and lifted him over the ensuing bank and gripe in a way subsequently described by ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... his clan to join Bruce's army before Bannockburn, observed, on his standard being lifted one morning, a glittering something in a clod of earth hanging to the flagstaff. It was this stone. He showed it to his followers, and told them he felt sure its brilliant lights were a good omen and foretold a victory—and victory was won on ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... nothing from the old, slavish world. It floated along directly, evenly; it proclaimed an iron virility, a calm threat. Simple, clear, it swept the people after it along an endless path leading to the far distant future; and it spoke frankly about the hardships of the way. In its steady fire a heavy clod seemed to burn and melt—the sufferings they had endured, the dark load of their habitual feelings, their cursed ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... aspiration, but is carried into effect,—its finiteness no longer resisted or deplored, but accepted,—just so far it ceases to be opaque and inert. The present seems trivial and squalid, because it is clutched and held fast,—the fugitive image petrified into an idol or a clod. But taken as it is, it becomes transparent, and reveals the fair ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... stupendous change! There lies the soulless clod. The light eternal breaks, The new immortal ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... is this?" I thought presently. "Do my own body and limbs refuse to obey my will? Cannot Caspar Haas, the undisputed lord of so many rich vineyards and fat pastures, move this wretched clod of earth which most certainly belongs to him? Oh, what does ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... love, you would ask! What do you take me for, pray? Am I such a blind, cold-hearted clod that I could go through the world for forty-five years and keep my heart untouched? Of course I have loved. I do love! It was once ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... spoke to her, but she heard us not. At last she gave a deep sigh, and the water coming into her eye, she said, "The worm—the worm is my bonny bridegroom, and Jenny with the many-feet my bridal maid. The mill-dam water's the wine o' the wedding, and the clay and the clod shall be my bedding. A lang night is meet for a bridal, but none shall be langer than mine." In saying which words, she fled from among us, with heels like the wind. The servants pursued; but long before they could stop her, she was past redemption in the deepest ...
— The Annals of the Parish • John Galt
... termination of his friend's life more than Will. Very genuine remorse darkened his days, and he blamed himself bitterly enough for all past differences with the dead. It was in a mood at once contrite and sorrowful that he listened to the echo of falling clod, and during that solemn sound mentally traversed the whole course of his relations with his sister's lover. Of himself he thought not at all, and no shadowy suspicion of relief crossed his mind upon ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... volume holds. To the rigid man of science this is frank mysticism; but without a sense of the unknown and unknowable, life is flat and barren. Without the emotion of the beautiful, the sublime, the mysterious, there is no art, no religion, no literature. How to get from the clod underfoot to the brain and consciousness of man without invoking something outside of, and superior to, natural laws, is the question. For my own part I content myself with the thought of some unknown and doubtless unknowable tendency or power in the elements themselves—a kind of universal ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... was caught by a lump of earth that sparkled at points In the sun's rays, a mere clod composed of clay and mica, lying In the dry bed of a bygone streamlet. Because it glittered he picked it up and examined it. After a time he bethought him that he was yet two and a half miles from town and very hungry. He arose, somewhat ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... off our ties as lightly as you assumed them. With a word you announce me wedded to you; with another you speak our divorcement. And I, poor clod, suffer it? The first, yes; but the last, no. You see, I have fallen in ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... were now led to the garden, where the farmer had half an acre plowed up, and each was furnished with an old, dull hoe, with crooked, knotty handles. The farmer then, with blushes and stammering, explained that he desired to have each particular clod chopped up fine with the hoe. The soldiers—town men—thought this an almost superhuman task and a great waste of time, but, so that the work procured food, they cared not what the work might be, and at it they went with a ...
— Detailed Minutiae of Soldier life in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1861-1865 • Carlton McCarthy
... shriek of anguish; flew towards the house, and in a moment, was again on the spot, bearing the priest's torch. He raised his brother's head. One hand was extended over the body, and fell to the earth like a clod of clay ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... the freshness from my fading cheek, And leave its shadows round my caverned eyes. All for a line in some unheeded scroll; All for a stone that tells to gaping clowns, "Here lies a restless wretch beneath a clod Where squats the ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... man, Who, seeing how souls grope And suffer in this world of mighty losses, And how hearts stagger on beneath life's crosses, Yet strives to rob them of their staff of faith And make them think dark death Ends all existence; think the worshipped child Cold in its mother's arms is but a clod And has not gone to God; That souls united by love undefiled And holy can by death be torn asunder To meet no more. It must be true that under This earth of ours there lies a Purgatory For those who seek to rob grief of the glory That shines through hope ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... longer," continued Kraken. "Formerly everyone fled at my approach. I carried away hens and rabbits in my bag; I drove sheep and pigs, cows, and oxen before me. To-day these clod-hoppers keep a good guard; they sit up at night. Just now I was pursued in the village of Anis by doughty labourers armed with flails and scythes and pitchforks. I had to drop the hens and rabbits, put my tail under my arm, and run as fast as I could. ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... "Thou great clod, put it the other way. Jeremy Stickles may have much to do about the Duke of Monmouth. The Whigs having failed of Exclusion, and having been punished bitterly for the blood they shed, are ripe for any violence. And ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... who so long wander over the world, Where will ye find a resting place for your weary steps? The wild dove has its nest, and the worm a clod of earth, Each man a country, but the Pole ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... fills her dish with the berries, then covers them with the white and yellow of milk and cream, thus suggesting a combination we are quick to follow. Milk alone, after it loses its animal heat, is a clod, and begets torpidity of the brain; the berries lighten it, give wings to it, and one is fed as by the air he breathes ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... the house, Aaron knelt to rake up with his fingers a handful of the new-thawed soil. He squeezed it. The clod in his hand broke apart of its own weight: it was not too wet to work. Festival-day though it was to his Schwotzer neighbors, he was eager to spear this virgin soil with ...
— Blind Man's Lantern • Allen Kim Lang
... clod! Thou hast spoiled the work with thy clumsy handling! Why canst not leave alone what thou dost not understand? Who gave permission to change? Body of me! Must I stand over thee every hour in the day and switch thy hands ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... years after his generation has passed away, his dead hand may rule the wealth which its living skill amassed. Then it dies another death, draws back into a deeper grave, and has henceforth no more power than any sister-clod. But, except as a penalty for crime, the law awards to a man right to his own possessions through life; and the personal facts and circumstances of his life have usually been considered among his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... nature to everything; as Epicurus does, who acknowledges no cause, but atoms, a vacuum, and their accidents. But when we[155] say that nature forms and governs the world, we do not apply it to a clod of earth, or piece of stone, or anything of that sort, whose parts have not the necessary cohesion,[156] but to a tree, in which there is not the appearance of chance, but of order and ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero |
