"Clod" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Meg, stepping up to him with a frown of indignation that made her dark eyes flash like lamps from under her bent brows,—"Fule-body! if I meant ye wrang, couldna I clod [*Hurl.] ye ower that craig [*Steep rock.], and wad man ken how ye cam by your end mair than Frank Kennedy? Hear ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... afraid that I must conclude that her unchivalrous clod of a husband has indeed stooped to make ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... black eyes on either side of the head EE, from one of which I could see a very bright reflection of the window, which made me ghess, that the Cornea of it was smooth, like those of bigger Insects. Its motion was pretty quick and strong, it being able very easily to tumble a stone or clod four times as big as its ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... interests me more than what is thought and supposed. Every fact is impure, but every fact contains in it the juices of life. Every fact is a clod, from which may grow an ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... may assist in bearing the bier, and once they set the bier on the ground and leave two pice and some grain where it lay, before taking it up again. After the funeral each person who has helped to carry it takes up a clod of earth and with it touches successively the place on his shoulder where the bier rested, his waist and his knee, afterwards dropping the clod on the ground. It is believed that by so doing he removes from his shoulder the weight of the corpse, ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... not!" said Joan, expressing in the emphasis, as well as in the look of superior scorn that she gave him, the difference that she felt lay between Mackenzie and a clod who might qualify for a sheepman ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... gigantic 'drop' of water, its surface interspersed with solid formations, the continents and other land masses. Moreover, the evidence assembled ever since Professor A. Wegener's first researches suggests that the continents are clod-like formations which 'float' on an underlying viscous substance and are able to move (very slowly) in both the vertical and horizontal directions. The oceanic waters are in fact separated from the viscous substratum by no more than a thin layer of solid earth, ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... and children are there, with men, women, and children of all the poorest classes from the villages round, whom the attractions of wages or the exertions of headmen Tokedars and Zillahdars have brought together to earn their daily bread. With the sticks they beat and break up every clod, leaving not one behind the size of a walnut. They collect all the refuse, weeds, and dirt, which are heaped up and burnt on the field, and so they go on till the zeraats look as clean as a nobleman's garden, and you would think that surely ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... your predicament must have recourse to artificial means. Nitre in broth, for instance,—about three grains to ten (cattle fed upon nitre grow fat); or earthy odors,—such as exist in cucumbers and cabbage. A certain great lord had a clod of fresh earth, laid in a napkin, put under his nose every morning after sleep. Light anointing of the head with oil, mixed with roses and salt, is not bade but, upon the whole, I prescribe ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the thing with rare spirit, caught, worried, and killed each clod of earth hurled at him, then bounded expectant forward for the next sacrifice that would be thrown for his delight in this ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... we are allied To That which doth provide And not partake, effect and not receive! A spark disturbs our clod; Nearer we hold of God Who gives, than of His tribes that ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... the Bracken which was shown to Faust, we should 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 ...
— Some Spring Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... 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 ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... two competitors grasped each other's hand as if they stood prepared for combat before the tribunal of the praetor; he commanded them to produce the object of the dispute; they went, they returned with measured steps, and a clod of earth was cast at his feet to represent the field for which they contended. This occult science of the words and actions of law was the inheritance of the pontiffs and patricians. Like the Chaldean astrologers, they announced ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... got little encouragement in his labour. Not only that the sparrows noisily criticized his work, and the chestnuts scornfully whisked their tails under his nose, but the harrows also objected, and resisted at every little stone or clod of earth. The tired horses continually stumbled, and when Slimak cried 'Woa, my lads!' and they went on, the harrows again resisted and pulled them back. When the worried harrows moved on for a bit, stones got into the horses' feet or under his own shoes, or choked ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... Promises are 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 is ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... and in the loamy clod, Swelling with vegetative force instinct, Didst burst thine, as theirs the fabled Twins Now stars; twor lobes protruding, paired exact; A leaf succeede and another leaf, And, all the elements thy puny growth Fostering propitious, thou becam'st a twig. Who lived when thou wast ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... is 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 now ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... ceiling and floors burst, and an abyss swallowed up five or six persons, men and women, full of hope and joy in life. He himself remained on the brink of the abyss unscathed. Though years intervened, there was still not a clod of earth, not a rock, no matter how adamantine, on which he could set foot with his old confidence; there was no wall or ceiling that he did not seem to see falling on his head and crushing him. Groping along the walls of houses on the street, terror would seize him. Open places ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... wheel of change, Knowing the former and the after lives. For so our scriptures truly seem to teach, That—once, and wheresoe'er, and whence begun— Life runs its rounds of living, climbing up From mote, and gnat, and worm, reptile, and fish, Bird and shagged beast, man, demon, Deva, God, To clod and mote again; so are we kin To all that is; and thus, if one might save Man from his curse, the whole wide world should share The lightened horror of this ignorance Whose shadow is chill fear, and cruelty Its bitter pastime. Yea, if one might save! ...
— The Light of Asia • Sir Edwin Arnold
... the furrow, The plough-cloven clod And the ploughshare drawn thorough, The germ and the sod, The deed and the doer, the seed and the sower, ...
— Songs before Sunrise • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... striking in the extreme. He peopled a whole stage sometimes in his best hours, and his Sykes and Fagin, his Claypole and Nancy, were all as real and as individual as if the parts had been sustained by separate performers, and each one a creature of genius. Who that saw it could forget the clod-pated glutton, with the huge imaginary sandwich and the great clasp knife in his hands, bolting the bulging morsel in the midst of the torrent of Fagin's instructions, and complaining "that a man got no time to eat his victuals in that house." Concerning ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... knees the Willow was peering over the edge. Bush McTaggart had disappeared. He had gone down like the great clod he was. The water of her pool had closed over him with a dull splash that was like a chuckle of triumph. He appeared now, beating out with his arms and legs to keep himself afloat, while the Willow's voice came to him in ...
— Baree, Son of Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... as she dislodged a drying clod of mud from the buggy robe. There was a moment's constrained silence, then ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... largest Bembex; but it differs from it, at first sight, by a singular feature of which I know no other example. From the side of the shell, which is uniformly smoothed on every side, a rough knob protrudes, a little clod of sand stuck on to the rest. The work of Stizus ruficornis can at once be recognized, among all the other cocoons of a similar nature, ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... manner, life within life, the less within the greater, and all within the Spirit Divine? In short, we are madly erring, through self-esteem, in believing man, in either his temporal or future destinies, to be of more moment in the universe than that vast "clod of the valley" which he tills and contemns, and to which he denies a soul for no more profound reason than that he does not ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... books as yet; they have got to be written; and if we pursue the idea a little further, and consider that these are all about the crude clods of life—for I often feel what a very crude and clumsy clod I am—only of the earth, a minute speck among one hundred millions of stars, how shall we write what is there? It is only to be written by the mind or soul, and that is why I strive so much to find what ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... "Every clod feels a stir of might, An instinct within it that reaches and towers, And, grasping blindly above it for light, Climbs to a soul in ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... you, you'll be the greatest fool in broad Scotland. Why, she is a very queen for beauty, and would rule Glenuskie like a princess—ay, and defend the Castle like Black Agnes of Dunbar herself! If you give her up, ye'll be no better than a clod.' ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... incidental repetitions of Milton's doctrine to which they give rise; it will be enough to exhibit the emphasis of Milton's foot administered at intervals to the human bundle it is propelling. "I mean not to dispute Philosophy with this Pork." he says near the beginning; "this clod of an antagonist," he calls him at the next kick; "a serving-man both by nature and function, an idiot by breeding, and a solicitor by presumption," is the third propulsion; after which we lose reckoning of the number of the kicks, they come sometimes ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... incidents in 'Tom Sawyer', most of them, really happened. Sam Clemens did clod Henry for getting him into trouble about the colored thread with which he sewed his shirt when he came home from swimming; he did inveigle a lot of boys into whitewashing, a fence for him; he did give Pain-killer ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... solitary waste, strange groups Of young volcanos come up, cyclops-like, Staring together with their eyes on flame— God tastes a pleasure in their uncouth pride. Then all is still; earth is a wintry clod: But spring-wind, like a dancing psaltress, passes Over its breast to waken it, rare verdure Buds tenderly upon rough banks, between The withered tree-roots and the cracks of frost, Like a smile striving with a ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... horrid. There must be many signs indeed before it would come into his head that a woman was in love with him, especially the one to whom he looked up, and thought so beautiful. For before all beauty he was humble, inclined to think himself a clod. It was the part of life which was always unconsciously sacred, and to be approached trembling. The more he admired, the more tremulous and diffident he became. And so, after his one wild moment, when she plucked those sweet-scented ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... to follow, though. He dropped to earth again, already a beaten beast; and, to complete the catastrophe, by a miracle he had landed where there was not a mouse or mole or vole hole, or any other cover, within reach. Only one big clod of earth there was, and round that he flung himself, with that stub, scaly snout weaving at his very tail, and rolled over and over and over—done, too utterly spent even ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... of pool or clod, God-spawn of lizard-footed clans, And those dog-headed hulks that trod Swart necks of the old Egyptians, Raw ...
— A Channel Passage and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... of the first watch ashore," cried Clarke, the master's mate; "for I'd twice liefer meet all the salvages of the Indies than to freeze like a clod, so here goes." And stepping upon the gunwale he made a spring in the dark, alighting upon a slippery rock and measuring his length upon the sand. Nothing daunted, however, he grasped a handful of sand in each fist, as if his prostration ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... 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 deathbed, could I suppose that any of my friends would be base enough to convey my carcass back to your ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... Like the earth they master and serve, those men, slow of eye and speech, do not show the inner fire; so that, at last, it becomes a question with them as with the earth, what there is in the core: heat, violence, a force mysterious and terrible—or nothing but a clod, a mass fertile and inert, cold and unfeeling, ready to bear a crop of plants that sustain life ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... you.' My companion's dark eyes sparkled with wisdom. 'In reality there is nothing inexplicable about this materialization. The whole cosmos is a materialized thought of the Creator. This heavy, earthly clod, floating in space, is a dream of God. He made all things out of His consciousness, even as man in his dream consciousness reproduces and vivifies ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... teach, for we cannot regard it as a real acquisition of science, that man is descended from the ape or from any other animal!" Then evidently no alternative remains but that he is descended from a god, or from a clod! ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... it began to be dusky, and then the little man said, 'Let me get down, I'm tired.' So the man took off his hat, and put him down on a clod of earth, in a ploughed field by the side of the road. But Tom ran about amongst the furrows, and at last slipped into an old mouse-hole. 'Good night, my masters!' said he, 'I'm off! mind and look sharp after me the next time.' Then they ran at once to the place, and poked the ends of their ...
— Grimms' Fairy Tales • The Brothers Grimm
... poacher paused, and having disentangled a very long worm from the twisted roots of a large clod, he said, "This makes one hundred and thirteen—a holy number. Now I've done, my lad; let ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... to an absolute stranger. He looked like an oafish clod, even viewed objectively, and Forrester was making no efforts in that direction. He had one arm around Gerda's waist and he was grinning up at her, and, sideways, at Forrester with a look that made them co-conspirators in what ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett
... appearance crept all about the smooth-shaven mouth of the duck man. He was not in the least an emotionless clod; he was not even cold or indifferent, but silent, slow at giving expression to ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele
... her fall, began to recover her equine senses. Sniffing the air and opening her wild bright eyes, she soon perceived her loved mistress lying flung about three yards distant from where she herself had rolled over and over on the thick wet clod of the field. With a supreme effort the gallant beast attempted to rise,—and presently, with much plunging and kicking, in which struggles however, she with an almost human intelligence pushed herself farther away from that prone figure on the ground, so that she ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... suddenly, out of season, upon the landscape. His hour was upon him when he turned and retraced his steps over the silver brook and up the gradual slope, where the sun shone on the bare soil and revealed each separate clod of earth as if it were seen under a microscope. All nature was at one with him. He felt the flowing of his blood so joyously that he wondered why the sap did not rise and mount ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... and discern of his brother the clod, Of his brother the brute, and his brother the God, He has gone from the council and put on the shroud ('Can ye hear?' saith Kabir), a ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling
... clod, his eyes the home of hate, Where rich the harvest bows, he lies in wait, Linking earth's death and music, mate ...
— Songs, Merry and Sad • John Charles McNeill
... long smouldering resentment against your reign, and this is a species 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 of ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... What's this! I believe you are both rogues alike. Lord Fop. No, Sir Tunbelly, thou wilt find to thy unspeakable mortification, that I am the real Lord Foppington, who was to have disgraced myself by an alliance with a clod; and that thou hast matched thy girl to a beggarly younger brother of mine, whose title deeds might be contained in thy tobacco-box. Sir Tun. Puppy! puppy!—I might prevent their being beggars, if I chose it; for ...
— Scarborough and the Critic • Sheridan
... foot in uncharacteristic fury. "You silly clod. Suppose you do win? Don't you see? They'll simply send another killer after you. They're out to get you, Joe Mauser. Don't you see you can't win against the whole Sov-world? Next time, possibly they ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... 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 Of ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... on the feudal baron who forbade the peasant to turn a clod of earth unless he surrendered to his lord a fourth of his crop. We called those the barbarous times. But if the forms have changed, the relations have remained the same, and the worker is forced, under the name of free contract, to accept feudal obligations. ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... a religious duty To love and worship children's beauty; They've least the taint of earthly clod, They're freshest from the hand of God; With heavenly looks they make us sure The heaven that made them must be pure; We love them not in earthly fashion, But with a beatific passion. I chanced to, yesterday, behold A maiden child of beauty's ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... fear to yield my breath, Since all is still unchanged by death; Since in some pleasant valley I may be, Clod beside clod, or tree by tree, Long ages hence, with her I love this hour; And feel a lively joy to share With her the sun and rain and air, To taste her quiet neighbourhood As the dumb things of field ...
— New Poems • Robert Louis Stevenson
... holy mystery In the days of chivalry. More than pageant was the Rite In the sight of clod and knight. Sword and Scepter, Orb and Rod, Faith in self and faith in God; Oaths of Homage fiercely flung, Faith in heart and faith in tongue;— Gone the things that meaning gave "With the old ...
— A line-o'-verse or two • Bert Leston Taylor
... two kernels now I take, This on my cheek for Lubberkin is worn, And Booby Clod on t'other side is borne; But Booby Clod soon falls upon the ground, A certain token that his love's unsound; While Lubberkin sticks firmly to the last; Oh! were his lips to ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... about the house, and when he made any change in the fixed ordering of the furrows, he thought himself no less important than an engineer with a gang of navvies; and when with his heel he crushed the dried top of a clod of earth, and filled up the valley at the foot of it, it seemed to him that his day ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... like the forced land of his adoption?" returned the nobleman, irritably. "My king is in exile. Why should I not be also? Should I stay there, herd with the cattle, call every shipjack 'Citizen' and every clod 'Brother'; treat every scrub as ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... 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 keep from laughing ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume II. • Walter de la Mare
... clod of earth should rise, And walk about, and breathe, and speak, and love, How one would tremble, and in what surprise ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... could well ha' been meant for to take. An' when the circus come round, I would make friends wi' the men, helpin' of 'em to look after their horses, an' they would sometimes, jest to amuse theirselves, teach me tricks I was glad enough to learn; an' they did say for a clod-hopper I got on very well. But that, you see, sir, set my monkey up, an' I took a hoath to myself I would do what none o' them could do afore I died—an' some thinks, sir," he added modestly, "as how I've done it—but that's neither ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... the clod will toll Grief enough for any ear. When the last has sounded clear, Know that I have reached the Goal (Which is ...
— Nirvana Days • Cale Young Rice
... Alexander was besieging Gaza, the largest city in Syria, a clod of earth was dropped upon his shoulder by a bird, which afterwards alighted upon one of the military engines, and became entangled in the network of ropes by which it was worked. This portent also was truly explained by Aristander; for the place ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... tears! O 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
... it that I must give my daughter to a lad that owns neither clod nor furrow? Whose estate is but a shovel for the ashes and a ...
— Three Wonder Plays • Lady I. A. Gregory
... attacks of stubble, thistles, and all other lacerating specimens of botany, and their exuberant figures were clad in buskins, and many-coloured garments, that were not long enough to conceal their greaves and clod-hopping boots. Altogether, these young women, when engaged at their ordinary avocations by the side of a spring, formed no unpicturesque subject for the sketcher's pencil, and might have been advantageously transferred to canvas by many an artist who travels to greater distances ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... 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 ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... is the formal basis of all life. It is the clay of the potter: which, bake it and paint it as he will, remains clay, separated by artifice, and not by nature, from the commonest brick or sun-dried clod. ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... 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 ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... sprites of injured men Shriek upward from the sod,— Ay, how the ghostly hand will point To show the burial clod; And unknown facts of guilty acts Are seen in ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... should know thy peace was sure, And only long to go The road which thou had'st gone, and wipe Away these tears that flow. Death to the slave has double power; It breaks the earthly clod, And breaks the tyrant's sway, that he May ...
— The Narrative of Lunsford Lane, Formerly of Raleigh, N.C. • Lunsford Lane
... gentlemen, that is what she is, and she charmed me, and I got no sleep for her for three nights, and one night at half-past eleven o'clock, I got up because I could not sleep, and went out and found a "walking toad" under a clod that had been dug up with a three-pronged fork. That is why I could not rest; she is a bad old woman; she put this toad under there to charm me, and her daughter is just as bad, gentlemen. She would bewitch any one; she charmed me, and I got no rest day or night ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... for I read 'em, I put 'em away and docket 'em, and remember 'em. I know his affairs better than he does: his income to a shilling, pay his tradesmen, wear his coats if I like. I may call Mr. Milliken what I please; but not YOU, you little scamp of a clod-hopping ploughboy. Know your station and do your business, or you don't wear THEM buttons long, ...
— The Wolves and the Lamb • William Makepeace Thackeray
... friend, to what can this be owing? Are we a piece of machinery, that, like the AEolian harp, passive, takes the impression of the passing accident? Or do these workings argue something within us above the trodden clod?" ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... do; it is a habit of mine," responded Dr. Dean, calmly. "But in the present case, it doesn't need much perspicuity to fathom your mystery. The dullest clod-hopper will tell you he can see through a millstone when there's a hole in it. And I was always a good hand at putting two and two together and making four out of them. You and Gervase are in love with the ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... the grave—'implora pace.' "I hope, whoever may survive me, and shall see me put in the foreigner's burying-ground at the Lido, within the fortress by the Adriatic, will see these 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." Hunt's view is, in this as in other subtle respects, nearer the truth than Moore's; for with all Byron's insight into Italian vice, ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... gathered and tied, what should come up but a big giant, nine foot high, and made a lick of a club at him. Well become Tom, he jumped a-one side, and picked up a ram-pike; and the first crack he gave the big fellow, he made him kiss the clod. ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... Sacian to a part of the field where a number of his officers and attendants were moving to and fro, mounted upon their horses, or seated in their chariots of war. The Sacian took up a hard clod of earth from a bank as he walked along. At length they were in the midst of ...
— Cyrus the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... world and would be a clod when no longer living—her essence would remain to inspirit some other evil woman—the same malignity in a beautiful shape which appeared in Lais, Messalina, Lucrezia Borgia, the Medici, Ninon, Lecouvreur, ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... softens the too strong sunlight. Indeed, daisies and strawberries are generally associated. Nature 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 or ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... how purblind, how blank, to the Infinite Care! Do I task any faculty highest, to image success? I but open my eyes—and perfection, no more and no less, In the kind I imagined, full-fronts me, and God is seen God 250 In the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul and the clod. And thus looking within and around me, I ever renew (With that stoop of the soul which in bending upraises it too) The submission of man's nothing-perfect to God's all-complete, As by each new obeisance in spirit, I climb to his feet. 255 Yet with ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... a clod of earth, and it smote Mahdi on the side of the head. The Missing Link sprang towards the crowd with a fearful cry. His antics were most alarming. The people ran, but they edged back again, and another clod thrown. Then came a stone. A second stone hit Nickie on the shin, and with a yell ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... mighty as 'tis small; yet must be fought the unequal fray; A myriad giants here; and there a pinch of dust, a clod of clay. ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... sleeps catches no fish," the lawyer muttered to himself, biting his lips. "But the priest will help me—spite of himself, he will help me. A health to Holy Mother Church! She would not do much if all her ministers were like this country clod. He is without ambition. He ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... if the other had not spoken. "So jealous is his affection in this instance, that I believe his granddaughter's marriage is something of a relief to him. He is positively impatient of any influence over the boy except his own—and that, I fear, is hardly for good." Picking up a clod of earth, Christopher crumbled it slowly to dust. "So the little chap comes in for all this, does he?" he asked, as his gaze swept over the wide fields in the distance. "He comes in for all that ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... could have been in Paradise, and seen God take a clod of red earth, and make that wretched clod of contemptible earth such a body as should be fit to receive his ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... whose name was Clod. "The earth has a soft carpet, of a new kind of emerald; overhead is a blue roof, made of turquoise; but I am told that there is a crack in it, and sometimes water comes pouring down in torrents. But the worst plague of all is a great glaring eye-ball of fire, which ...
— Fairy Book • Sophie May
... and 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
... at the end of a week there was plenty of evidence that lash and club and fist had done their work well; the king's body was a sight to see—and to weep over; but his spirit?—why, it wasn't even phased. Even that dull clod of a slave-driver was able to see that there can be such a thing as a slave who will remain a man till he dies; whose bones you can break, but whose manhood you can't. This man found that from his first effort ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... a sign that news of his father was at hand.[1627] An act performed without ulterior purpose may be taken to symbolize some sort of fortune. When the Calif Omar sent an embassy to the Persian King Yezdegird summoning him to embrace Islam, the angry king commanded that a clod of earth should be brought and that the ambassadors should bear it out of the city, which they accordingly did; and this act was taken both by Arabs and by Persians as a presage of Moslem victory—the invaders ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... steep Hurl'd headlong, swam with pain the mantled pool, Or scaled the cliff, or danced on hollow winds With antic shapes, wild natives of the brain! Her ceaseless flight, though devious, speaks her nature Of subtler essence than the trodden clod: Active, aerial, towering, unconfined, Unfetter'd with her gross companion's fall. Even silent night proclaims my soul immortal: Even silent night proclaims eternal day! For human weal Heaven husbands all events; Dull sleep instructs, nor ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... gardens yield High shelt'ring woods and wa's maun shield, [walls] But thou, beneath the random bield [shelter] O' clod or stane, Adorns the ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... similar expression has 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
... upon the air like sighs—like the distant tones of a bell tolling a requiem—a lament, poetic, mournful, despairing, yet ineffably sweet and tender, ending in one deep, sustained note like the last clod of earth falling upon ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... with it rapidly crumbles and spreads about the new-turned soil. Now they trample the bed thoroughly, throwing out any stones or pebbles discovered by their feet, and frequently using the kay-kay further to break up some small clod of earth. Finally a large section of the sementera is prepared, and the toilers form in line abreast and slowly tread back and forth over the plat, making the bed soft and smooth beneath the ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... man, alert Amid the ruins and the dirt, That other men to endless day Themselves uplifted from the clod May see, and learn and know that God Is greater far ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... while consciousness is not mine, while to all appearances I am a clod. And may not this same state of being, though but alternate with me, be continually that of many dumb, passive objects we so carelessly regard? Trust me, there are more things alive than those that crawl, or fly, or swim. Think you, my lord, there ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... 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 ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... patent that this terrible man was no ignorant clod, such as one would inevitably suppose him to be from his exhibitions of brutality. At once he became an enigma. One side or the other of his nature was perfectly comprehensible; but both sides together were bewildering. ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... Hill to Greshamsbury; something to give back to his 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 ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... 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 lines ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... voluble from the foreign wars. Only dullards, or the unthinking, can be surprised by the ease with which a quick-witted man, having some knowledge of Latin, can learn to read a novel in French, Italian, or Spanish. That Shakespeare was the very reverse of a dullard, of the clod of Baconian fancy, is proved by the fact that he was thought capable of his works. For courtly manners he had the literary convention and Lyly's Court Comedies, with what he saw when playing at the Court and in the houses of the great. As to untaught nobility of manners, ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... But it was not—professional. It was the first time in my life. Almost do I regret—almost do I regret that I did not do it sooner—it has been crowned with such success. You have held me in your arms—your arms. Oh, you will never know what that first embrace meant to me. I am not a clod. I am not iron nor stone. I am a woman—a warm, ...
— Theft - A Play In Four Acts • Jack London
... clod, I run whose steps were slow, I reap the very wheat of God That once had none ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... beautifully phrased in two or three lines which I wish to repeat to you from Browning's Saul: "I but open my eyes, and perfection, no more and no less, In the kind I imagined, full-fronts me, and God is seen God In the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul and the clod. And, thus looking within and around me, I ever renew (With that stoop of the soul which in bending upraises it, too), As by each new obeisance in spirit I climb to ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... on to the bridge, two men ran swiftly from the custom-house toward the swampy lowland. Before they entered the marsh they stopped, and bound long wooden stilts to their feet; and, thus equipped, stepped without difficulty from one earth-clod to another. No horseman could have followed them across the treacherous ground. De Fervlans's adjutant became uneasy when he saw these two men, whose actions seemed suspicious to him; but the marquis ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... Madam Petulant desired her daughters to mind the moral, and believe no man's fair words; 'For you'll see, children,' said she, 'these soldiers are never to be depended upon; they are sometimes here, sometimes there—don't you see, daughter Betty, Colonel Clod, our next neighbour in the country, pulls off his hat to you? Courtesy, good child, his estate is just by us.' Florimel was now mortified down to Prudentia's humour; and Prudentia exalted into hers. This was observed: Florimel invites us to the ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... overestimate the one or the other. Traces, at least, of a similar mode of thought persisted by the Greek Fathers of the Church, and disappeared, if ever, with the predominance of Latin theology. To the oriental the idea of evolution is natural. The earth is to him no inert, resistant clod; she ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... new creatures everywhere stir the earth and the waters. Life and matter become, as it were, a new creation, and one can believe anything when he sees how many forms life and matter can assume under the mellowing rays of the sun. The clod becomes a flower; the egg a reptile, fish, or bird. The cunning woodchuck, that looks out of his hole on the awakening earth and blue sky, seems almost to have a sense of the miracle that has been wrought. The boy who throws a stone at him, to drive ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... 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 ...
— The Happiness of Heaven - By a Father of the Society of Jesus • F. J. Boudreaux
... instructed in these mysteries, and the other ceremonies of their 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 ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian |
