"Clod" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a million disguises Never created a crankier clod, More unaccountably made of surprises, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 1, 1914 • Various
... two kilometers round 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
... to get the ash which is 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 short time the tobacco-plant springs ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... fool listened to a sprightly, contagious carol and noted its effect on clod and hind, he wondered if this could be the same voice he had heard, uplifted in one of Master Calvin's psalms in the solitude of the forest. She had the gift of music, and, sometimes on the journey, would break out with a catch or madrigal by Marot, ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... thee," said the fashionable gallant whom we have described, "honest Tom; and a cup of welcome to thee out of Looby-land. Why, thou hast been so long in the country, that thou hast got a bumpkinly clod-compelling sort of look thyself. That greasy doublet fits thee as if it were thy reserved Sunday's apparel; and the points seem as if they were stay-laces bought for thy true-love Marjory. I marvel thou canst still relish a ragout. ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... the world of wealth, fashion, extravagance, and youth. He was no more than three-and-twenty himself. He ought to have been fired by the sight of all this beauty, and all this happiness. Nobody in the world can look half so happy as a lovely girl finely dressed. But he sat there like a clod, dull and insensate. ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... am learning, but, oh! so slowly, for mine is not a nature that is really shaped for war. A vivid imagination is here a handicap, and it is those who have little or none who make the best soldiers. At last the "finished and finite clod" has come into his own. Stolid, in a danger he hardly realizes, he remains at his post, while the other, perchance shaking in every limb, has double the battle to fight. My pencil wanders on and I hardly seem to know what I write. Confused ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... 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 ...
— A Channel Passage and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... toward Tempe in a brighter world than I had known since the time when I felt my bosom swell at the wearing of the new cap my mother had made for me, the day when I, too young to be sad, had thrown the clod over the stone fence as we went down to the great ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... rare as a day in June? Then, if ever, come perfect days; Then Heaven tries earth if it be in tune, 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, And, groping blindly above it for light, Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers; The flush of life may well be seen Thrilling ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... 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 ...
— Grimms' Fairy Tales • The Brothers Grimm
... feel the sun, the wind, the nip of frost. Must I slink like a craven because I've lost the love of one man? Must I hate Flo Hutter because she will make Glenn happy? Never!... All of this seems better so, because through it I am changed. I might have lived on, a selfish clod!" ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... upon which were perched four or five wet, disconsolate troopers armed with picks and shovels. Old Jeremiah followed, mounted, a feverish light in his eyes and drops of moisture standing on his grizzled mustache. So he went forth and saw them consign to earth the clod that had been his son—or rather, consign to water, for the grave was half full when they reached it. He did not see it, either; but he ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... me than that of descent. It seems to me a finer thing to be the advanced offspring of a simian ancestor, that has developed progressively from the lower mammals in the struggle for life, than the degenerate descendant of a god-like being, made from a clod, and fallen for his sins, and an Eve created from one of his ribs. Speaking of the rib, I may add to what I have said about the development of the skeleton, that the number of ribs is just the same in ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... he said. "I threw a clod of mud at your hero. I thought it would be good for him. However, you will be relieved to hear that it went wide of the mark. He still sits secure in his tight little shrine and smiles magnanimously ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... 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 the reflection that the knowledge of those fateful weeks long past was now ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... flattering delusions of youth! Live and die in the shade! Like the insects humming in the darkness, offer up your evening prayer. Be content to fade out of life without a murmur whenever the Master of life shall breathe upon your tiny flame! It is out of myriads of unknown lives that every clod of earth is built up. The infusoria do not count until they are millions upon millions. Accept ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the marks from time to time, instinctively scenting the route, that tracks trodden by wild beasts should not lead her astray; cleverly she picked out with her sharp eyes the places where the ground was still firm; at times she would leap from one clod of peat to another. The space between these spots might be overgrown by green grass, with yellow flowers dotted here and there, but the sagacious animal knew, felt, perhaps had even experienced, that the depth there was deceptive; ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... 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. I had already remarked that his language was excellent, ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... the establishment of the second Republic. He had lived as a practising Christian, and so died, surrounded by his wife and family. Wild legends grew about his death, but have no foundation. A peasant clod in San Casciano could not have made a simpler end. He was buried in the family Chapel in Santa Croce, and a monument was there at last erected with the epitaph by Doctor Ferroni—'Tanto nomini nullum par elogium.' The first edition of his complete works was published ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... of injured men Shriek upward from the sod— Aye, how the ghostly hand will point To show the burial clod; And unknown facts of guilty acts Are seen ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... when the first clod of the valley fell on my sister's coffin. God sustained me under the shock! I neither groaned nor wept. When Mr. Hardinge returned the customary thanks to those who had assembled to assist me "in burying my dead out of my sight," I had even sufficient fortitude to bow to the ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... picking up a clod, jerked it toward a fence-post. The clod happened to hit the post and was flicked into dust. "That ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... to teach a young, vigorous, passionate man how to gain the love of a cold-blooded, vain and conceited woman. Her letters will show the various stages of her desires as she went along vainly struggling to beat something like comprehension into the dull brain of a clod, who could not understand the simplest principle of love, or the smallest point in the female character. At last she resolved to use an argument that was convincing with the brightest minds with whom she had ever dealt, that ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... return those fires, too cruel-nice! For whilst you fear me cindars, see, I'm ice! A nummed speaking clod and mine own show, My self congeal'd, a man cut out in snow: Return those living fires. Thou, who that vast Double advantage from one-ey'd Heav'n hast, Look with one sun, though 't but obliquely be, And if not shine, vouchsafe to ...
— Lucasta • Richard Lovelace
... this, I must hide myself. I lay down, very slowly, deep in the ditch. I now felt that I had been long, long dead and that I was lying here alone, waiting for I forget what. That keeper: was there such a person? He now seemed to me an awesome clod of earth, which came rolling down, slowly but steadily, and which would fall heavily upon me. Then he turned into a lovely white ashplant, which stood there waving its boughs in a stately manner. I would let him go past and then would go away. People were waiting for me, I had to ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... whose intellect and sensibilities inspired him with nothing but contempt and loathing for the mass of mankind, the aristocrat who in a dozen plays sneers at the greasy caps and foul breaths of the multitude, fell in love with Dogberry, and Bottom, Quickly and Tearsheet, clod and clown, pimp and prostitute, for the laughter they afforded. His humour is rarely sardonic; it is almost purged of contempt; a product not of hate but of love; full of sympathy; ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... "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 ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... just as depressing as usual but he could always get a lift from the comic section. He even had a favorite strip, a fact that he scarcely dared mention to himself. "Rattly Robot," a dull-witted mechanical clod who was continually falling over himself and getting into trouble. It was a repellent caricature, but could still be very funny. Jon was just starting to read it when the ...
— The Velvet Glove • Harry Harrison
... following consecutive sentences, 'Have you ever asked for that instruction by which we hear what cannot be heard, by which we perceive what cannot be perceived, by which we know what cannot be known? What is that instruction? As, my dear, by one clod of clay all that is made of clay is known, the modification (i.e. the effect) being a name merely which has its origin in speech, while the truth is that it is clay merely,' &c. Now if the term 'Sat' denoted the pradhana, which is merely the ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... placed on the ground, the rim of the mouth coming on the soil and the bottom elevated on an old tin pan, so that the beaker stood inclined at an angle of about forty-five degrees with the horizon. The slides were moistened, one was laid on a stone, one on a clod, and a third on the grass. Returned to bed, not having been gone over ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 384, May 12, 1883 • Various
... processes, something quite transcending the mundane forces. He has invented or dreamed myths and legends to throw the halo of the exceptional, the far removed, the mystical, or the divine around his origin. He has spurned the clod with his foot; he has denied all kinship with bird and beast around him, and looked to the heavens above for the sources of his life. And then unpitying science comes along and tells him that he is under the same law as the life he treads under foot, and that that law is ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... the State lands, especially the forests, would be divided among the communes, and that, by some political legerdemain or other, everybody would have free fire-wood, free grazing for his cattle, and over and above that, a piece of gold without working for it. That he should give up a single clod of his own to further the general "partition" had never entered the mind of the peasant communist; and the perception that this was an essential preliminary to "partition" was often a sufficient ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... sacred Love to make Lucinda thine; But other union these dire drums foredoom, The dark dead union of the eternal tomb. On yonder plain, soon sheeted o'er with blood, Our nuptial couch shall prove a crimson clod; For there this night thy livid corse must lie, I'll seek it there, and on that bosom die. Yet go; tis duty calls; but o'er thy head Let this white plume its floating foliage spread; That from the rampart, ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... 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 ...
— Cyrus the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... saying he ought to be master in his own house. But the countryman, piquing himself upon his good breeding, still refused to comply, till the gentleman, losing all patience, laid both his hands upon the farmer's shoulders, and made him sit down by main force, saying, 'Sit thee down, clod-pole! for in whatever place I am seated, that is the upper end to thee.' That is my tale, and truly I think it comes in here ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... us were E.T.I. Team 17, whose assignment was the asteroids. We were four years and three months out of Terra, and we'd reached Vesta right on schedule. Ten minutes after landing, we had known that the clod was part of the crust of Planet X—or Sorn, to give it its right name—one of the few such parts that hadn't been blown clean out of the ...
— Zen • Jerome Bixby
... drawing once more and your contour shows again the new ground form. Drop into your main pond a round clod and you will have a new watermark, like figure 9, to add to your drawing. This new contour, of the same level with the one showing the limit of the depression, shows on the ...
— Manual for Noncommissioned Officers and Privates of Infantry • War Department
... flatteries from me, While I am empty of good things; I'll call thee fair, and I'll agree Thou boldest Love in silken strings, When thou bast primed me from thy plenteous store! But, oh! till then a clod am I: No seed within to throw up flowers: All's drouthy to the fountain dry: To empty stomachs Nature lowers: The lake was full where heaven look'd ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... cinnabar. It is said that it was first found in the Cilbian country belonging to Ephesus, and both it and its properties are certainly very strange. First, before getting to the vermilion itself by methods of treatment, they dig out what is called the clod, an ore like iron, but rather of a reddish colour and covered with a red dust. During the digging it sheds, under the blows of the tools, tear after tear of quicksilver, which is at once gathered up ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius
... inferred, that those that pray not at all cannot be good, cannot know, love, or trust in God. For if the star, though it shine, is not the sun, then surely a clod of dirt cannot be the sun. Why, a praying man doth as far outstrip a non-praying man as a star outstrips a clod of earth. A non-praying man lives like a beast. "The ox knows his owner, and the ass his master's crib; but this man doth not know, but this man doth not consider;" Isa. i. 3. ...
— The Pharisee And The Publican • John Bunyan
... gardens yield, High sheltering woods and wa's[084] maun shield, But thou beneath the random bield[085] O' clod or stane, Adorns the ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... des Geistes Mingle the spirit, Gieszet hinein! The life of the bowl; Leben dem Leben Man is an earth-clod Gibt er ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 18, 1841 • Various
... fallen leaf, each sprig or spray of undergrowth, the very weeds, each clod." Lit. "what kind of material, what kind of soil does not become manure when ...
— The Economist • Xenophon
... "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 bone ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... even speak of ill on such a day," said her neighbour. "Look at the sky's blueness and the spring bursting forth in every branch and clod—and the very skylarks singing hard as ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... over his ears, for the fire had died to a heap of whitening embers and the cold of the cabin made the nose of him tingle. The roar grew louder and nearer-then the cabin shivered and creaked in the suddenness of the blast that struck it. A clod of dirt plumbed down upon his shoulder, bringing with it a shower of finer particles. "Another blizzard!" he groaned, "and the worst we've ...
— The Lure of the Dim Trails • by (AKA B. M. Sinclair) B. M. Bower
... 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 ...
— The Late Mrs. Null • Frank Richard Stockton
... thoughts of tenderness; Yet looking on thy young brow it will yearn, And in my bosom's innermost recess, Thoughts that have slumbered long awake and burn With a wild strength which nothing can repress! Be still, worn heart, be still; does not the cold And heavy clay—clod mingle with ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... is, if another from his affection should infuse something into his mind when he himself felt no affection for knowing or grasping it, would he receive it? Indeed, could he receive it? Would he not be like one called a dullard or a clod? ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... where I list, and die when God pleases with the knowledge that my life had not been altogether barren. And that poor girl, Fanfulla! Think of her. She is to be joined in loveless union to such a gross, unfeeling clod as Gian Maria. Have you no pity ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... relentless and invincible enemy to earthly happiness, the consumption. In the month of January we beheld this amiable and interesting girl in the glow of health and spirits, the delight of her friends, the joy and pride of her family; she is now cold and lifeless as the clod of the valley. So falls the tender flower of spring as it expands its bosom to the chilling blight of the morning frost. Endowed by nature with a mind unusually discriminating, and a docility of temper and disposition admirably calculated to reap profit from instruction, Miss Hoffman ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... the Cowardly Lion anxiously. A great clod of earth landed on his head, filling his eyes and mouth ...
— The Royal Book of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... above; but all regard for their majesty was expelled by the boundless fire of his spirit. For in brave souls vehemence is not always sapped by reason, nor doth counsel defeat rashness. Or perchance it was that Hother remembered how the might of the lordliest oft proveth unstable, and how a little clod ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... unsightly and noisome, unable to roam, Days pass, God's at work, the slow chemistry's going on, Behold! Behold! O brilliant, buoyant life, full winged, all the heaven's thy home! O poor, mean man, stumbling and falling, e'en shamed by a clod. Years pass, God's at work, spiritual awakening has come, Behold! Behold! O regal, royal soul, then image, now the likeness ...
— What All The World's A-Seeking • Ralph Waldo Trine
... everything you looked at. I would not have you stained; I desired to pass my whole life between the four walls of some dingy and eternal gaol, forever alone with you, lest you become like other men. I would in that period have been the very bread you eat, the least perfume which delights you, the clod you touch in crushing it, and I have often loathed some pleasure I derived from life because I might not transfer it to you undiminished. For I wanted somehow to make you happy to my own anguish.... It was wicked, I suppose, for the imagining of ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... peasant, where there is nobody to breathe a soul into the clod. But what is he where there are thousands of the wealthy and the wise? What is he round London—the great, the noble, and the enlightened? Pretty much the same, and from pretty much the same causes. Few trouble themselves about him. He feels that he is ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... it—and in the night he had come into the preserve of the wealthy marquis. Olga's friends—and Olga! A fine escape he had made of it, into the very sphere of the Countess Tcherny's activities! The Ch‰teau must be near here, at the most not more than a few kilometers distant. He was a clod-pate, nothing less. For with all the Oire to choose from he had stumbled blindly into the one path that led to danger. What was to be done? He got to his feet stealthily and went through the lodge. A dining ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... in 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 the ...
— By Still Waters - Lyrical Poems Old and New • George William Russell
... 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 ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... called on to officiate 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 ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... thine own will that bids them ebb and flow, And from their inundating flood depose Organic germs, whence health and vigour grow? Yet though such witness serve thee to disclose In human tenement divine abode, Not thine be the material creed that shows The spirit's birthplace in the moulded clod; Not thine the pantheist raving, that because God dwelleth with thee, thou thyself art God. Bethink thee—is't self-reverence that o'erawes Thy prostrate soul, and from thy faltering tongue, Subdued, involuntary homage draws? And when by ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... taken home and examined, and according to its height, shape, and features would be the height, shape, and features of the future husband or wife. The taste of the custock, that is, the heart of the stem, was an infallible indication of his or her temper; and a clod of earth adhering to the root signified, in proportion to its size, the amount of property which he or she would bring to the common stock. Then the kail-stock or runt, as it was called in Ayrshire, was placed over the lintel of the door; ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... 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 ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... rich and poor are fairly pitted, we shall see who can hang or burn fastest. It is not always revenge that stimulates these kindlings. There is a love of exerting mischief. Think of a disrespected clod that was trod into earth, that was nothing, on a sudden by damned arts refined into an exterminating angel, devouring the fruits of the earth and their growers in a mass of fire! What a new existence; what ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... tree, he loves the life that springs in star and clod, He loves the love that gilds the clouds, and greens the April sod, He loves the wide Beneficence; his soul ...
— Checking the Waste - A Study in Conservation • Mary Huston Gregory
... straight at the noses of his captors. He consigned them to red regions; he called upon the pestilential wrath of strange gods. And with it all he was singularly free from recognition of the finer points of the conduct of prisoners of war. It was as if a clumsy clod had trod upon his toe and he conceived it to be his privilege, his duty, to use deep, ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... and foil'd Break it; another sees it spoil'd Ere it is gotten. Thus the world Is all to piecemeals cut, and hurl'd By factious hands. It is a ball Which Fate and force divide 'twixt all The sons of men. But, O good God! While these for dust fight, and a clod, Grant that poor I may smile, and be At rest and perfect ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... no such soulless clod: living, perfected it shall rise Transfigured in the light of God, and giving glory to the skies: And that which makes this life so sweet, ...
— Legends and Lyrics: Second Series • Adelaide Anne Procter
... let goddesses—if such indeed there be—take their way and work their will upon the helpless, and I, a mortal, will take mine until the clutch of doom closes round my throat and chokes out life and memory, and I too am a goddess—or a clod. ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... soul-breathing form of genius, and the clod of the valley, there was now no difference; and the "end and object" of a man's brief existence was now accomplished in him who, while yet all young and ardent, had viewed the bitter perspective of humanity with a philosophic eye and pronounced even ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... or Alessandro de' Medici. Once and 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 Horatio Pater
... of high-spirited fun even in the raptures and despairs of his first love for his cousin, Harriet Grove. He tried to convert her to republican atheism, until the family, becoming alarmed, interfered, and Harriet was disposed of otherwise. "Married to a clod of earth!" exclaims Shelley. He spent nights "pacing the churchyard," and slept with a loaded pistol and ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... 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 a youth of a very mean and obscure ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... she made for herself; and I felt a primitive angry revolt against the delicate trafficking of souls that could end in such ravage and disaster. The price was too heavy; I would have denuded her, at the moment, of all that had led her into this, and turned her out a clod with fine shoulders like fifty other women in Peshawur. Then, perhaps, because I held myself silent and remote and she had no emotion of fear from me, she ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... bells, and the air was vibrant with the rush and whisper of waters. As the shadows melted in the crucible of dawn, and an opaline high trembled on the dark mountain-tops that towered round us, I saw marvels which either had not existed last night, or I had been dull clod enough to miss them. ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... Cuzco means a clod, or hard unirrigated land. Cuzquini is to break clods of earth, or to level. Montesinos derives the name of the city from the verb "to level," or from the heaps of clods, of earth called cuzco. Cusquic-Raymi is the month ...
— History of the Incas • Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa
... was tired, physically weary. His body was dull and heavy, sluggish. So was his mind. He was aware of this, aware that a nervous reaction of some sort was upon him. He wished that he could always be like that,—dull, phlegmatic, uncaring. To cease thinking, to have done with feeling, to be a clod, dead to desires, to high hopes and ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... a clod of earth should rise, And walk about, and breathe, and speak, and love, How one would tremble, and in what surprise Gasp: ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... body." Be it however where or what it may, it is this which constitutes the great essence of, and gives value to, our existence; and all the wonders of our microcosm would without it be a form only, destined immediately to perish, and of no greater account than as a clod of the valley. ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... 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 World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
... "We're going back. We'll face it together and we'll conquer it together. You won't be alone now. Darling, don't you see—it's because you aren't a clod, because you're sensitive and imaginative that you experience fear. It's not anything to be ashamed of. You were simply the first man on Earth to develop a new and completely different kind of ...
— The Man from Time • Frank Belknap Long
... done 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 amaranth or ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... is each ridge, of thy cup drinking, Each clod relenteth at thy dressing, {169} Thy cloud-borne waters inly sinking, Fair spring sproutes forth, blest with thy blessing; The fertile year is with thy bounty crouned, And where thou go'st, thy ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... Nature is lashing everything—grass, fruit, insects, cattle, human creatures—more fiercely onward to the fulfillment of her ends. She is the great heartless haymaker, wasting not a ray of sunshine on a clod, but caring naught for the light that beats upon a throne, and holding man and woman, with their longing for immortality, and their capacities for joy and pain, as of no more account than a couple of ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... grindstone, where a knight's sword was being sharpened, he was nearly knocked down by a horse, urged at some speed through the crowds. By a rope from the collar, three dead bodies were drawn along the ground, dusty and disfigured by bumping against stone and clod. They were those of slaves, hanged the preceding day, perhaps for pilfering, perhaps for a mere whim, since every baron had power of ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... 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, but once or twice I was on the point ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... We've done it out of a 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 dirt on him. ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... ear to any bell which upon any occasion rings? but who can remove it from that bell which is passing a piece of himself out of this world? No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... waves are edged With foam, white as the bitten lip of hate, When, in the 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 wrinkled ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... 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 being half angry, ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... this frail flesh lies low A withered clod, and the free soul has burst Through the world-fetters? Not of souls accursed With cherished lusts that mar them, those who sow Evil and reap the harvest, and who bow At Mammon's golden shrine, but those who thirst For Truth, and see not,—spirits deep ...
— Poems • Sophia M. Almon
... light our common nature gave, But every sunbeam, falling from her throne, Wears on our hearts some coloring of our own Chilled in the slave, and burning in the free, Like the sealed cavern by the sparkling sea; Lost, like the lightning in the sullen clod, Or shedding radiance, like the smiles of God; Pure, pale in Virtue, as the star above, Or quivering roseate on the leaves of Love; Glaring like noontide, where it glows upon Ambition's sands,—the desert in the sun,— Or soft suffusing o'er ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... protected them from the cutting 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 ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... so at one with herself, turning her whole living face to Heaven, and carrying me along with her into that Heaven, that I asked myself how the opinions of men could ever have so spun themselves away from life so far as to deem the earth only a dry clod, and to seek for angels above it or about it in the emptiness of the sky,—only to find them nowhere.... But such an experience as this passes for fantastic. The earth is a globular body, and what more she may be, one can find in ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... till God make men of some other metal than earth. Would it not grieve a woman to be overmastered with a piece of valiant dust? to make an account of her life to a clod of wayward marl? No, uncle, I'll none: Adam's sons are my brethren, and truly I hold it a sin to match in ...
— Much Ado About Nothing • William Shakespeare [Knight edition]
... that the enemy was up and abroad, with ambuscades, alarms, and thrilling sallies. It was the gardener's boy, I knew well enough; a red proletariat, who hated me just because I was a gentleman. Hastily picking up a nice sticky clod in one hand, with the other I delicately projected my hat beyond the shelter of the tree-trunk. I had not fought with Red-skins ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... landscape is seen, with Romsey in the distance, and (the horse having stopped again) Cabby points out Queen Elizabeth's shooting-box across the fields. In a lot close by cricketers are at play, and a little farther on, where there is a vine-covered beerhouse, a crowd of clod-hoppers are gathered in a green field, looking at two of their number engaged in a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... 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 ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... CLOD'DIPOLE (3 syl.), "the wisest lout of all the neighboring plain." Appointed to decide the contention between Cuddy ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... seems by turns To upbraid me with my fault and fortune drear, Whose fond and foolish heart, where grief sojourns, A goddess deem'd exempt from mortal fear. Security, how easy to betray! The radiance of those eyes who could have thought Should e'er become a senseless clod of clay? Living, and weeping, late I've learn'd to say That here below—Oh, knowledge dearly bought!— Whate'er delights ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... communication to an end, than, despite his promise and the poor dog's cries, he caught up a huge clod of earth and dropped it upon the devoted head of the struggling animal beneath. There was a great splash; a bubble or two came to the surface of the horrid pool, and the brutal deed was consummated. Yet at the same moment Bruin regretted he had been so precipitate, ...
— The Adventures of a Bear - And a Great Bear too • Alfred Elwes
... look on me and live: so runs The mortal legend—thou that couldst not live Nor look on me (so the divine decree)! That saw'st me in the cloud, the wave, the bough, The clod commoved with April, and the shapes Lurking 'twixt lid and eye-ball in the dark. Mocked I thee not in every guise of life, Hid in girls' eyes, a naiad in her well, Wooed through their laughter, and like echo fled, Luring thee down the primal silences Where the heart ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... was all right, but news of the man-hunt had run through the country, and when the parson's housekeeper one day saw him hold the wash-bowl for his guest she wanted to know why he was so polite to a common clod. Master Jon told her that it was none of her business, but that night he piloted his friend across the lake to Isala, where Sven Elfsson lived, a gamekeeper who knew the country and could be trusted. ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... homes, or to drive plundered spoils to the coast. Such violence sits not in our mind, nor is a conquered people so insolent. There is a place Greeks name Hesperia, an ancient land, mighty in arms and foison of the clod; Oenotrian men dwelt therein; now rumour is that a younger race from their captain's name have called it Italy. Thither lay our course . . . when Orion rising on us through the cloudrack with sudden surf bore us on blind shoals, and scattered us afar with his boisterous ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... were a set of common clod-hopping wretches, with frize coats and brogues, that no man could get round at all, for they were as cunning as foxes, and could tell blarney from good sense, rather better than people with better ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... the Torrent Prophet, An inspired Demosthenes, To the Doubter's soul appealing, Louder than the preacher-seas: Dreamer! wouldst have nature spurn thee For a dumb, insensate clod? Dare to doubt! and these shall teach thee Of a truth there ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... I have heard some talk of a swaggering braggart, prodigal in valiant promise, but very huckster in a pitiful performance; in a word, a clown whose attempt to ape the courtier has never veiled the clod." ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... not to be punished for madness, because it was a distemper. Now I will maintain that cowardice is a distemper, as well as madness; for nobody would be afraid, if he could help it." "There is more logic in that remark," resumed the knight, "than I expected from your clod-pate, Crabshaw. But I must explain the difference between cowardice and madness. Cowardice, though sometimes the effect of natural imbecility, is generally a prejudice of education, or bad habit contracted from misinformation, or misapprehension; ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... 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 region of thick-ribbed ice; To be imprison'd in the viewless winds, And blown with restless violence round ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... fell'st mature; 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 such? Of couldst thou ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... 'Mrs. Martins is an old witch, 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 ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... 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
... condition of life. Can a conviction that has been universal in all ages and among all peoples be a delusion? Then whoever or whatever created human nature built it on a lie. This accursed rock has fallen on my body, and holds it as if it were a mere clod of earth, as it soon may be; but it does not hold my mind. My thoughts have followed father and dear, dear mother, and sister Laura across the sea a hundred times to-night. But oh, how strangely my thoughts ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... 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 was taken, ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... 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 a ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... 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 grim system ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... flow'rs our 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 histie ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... to laugh sarcastically, a laugh of withering scorn. He wished to reply in polished tones, "Skylarkin'! You poor, dull clod, what do you know of my ambitions, my ideals? You, with your petty life devoted to gaining a few paltry dollars!" But he did not say this, or even register the emotion that would justly accompany such a subtitle. He merely rejoined, "All right, sir, I'm not going to touch them," and ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... be 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 had been voluntary, and springing ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... universe; they then 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 its excess ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... seeking heart; and, if I try to walk upright, wilt guide me. What despair must he feel, who, after a whole life passed in trying to build up himself, resolves that it would have been far better if he had kept still as the clod of the valley, or yielded easily as the leaf to every breeze! A path has been appointed me. I have walked in it as steadily as I could. I am what I am; that which I am not, teach me in the others. I will ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... altered. At the first few drops, all the ants would hasten, the throbbing corpuscles speeding up. Then, as the rain came down heavier, the column melted away, those near each end hurrying to shelter and those in the center crawling beneath fallen leaves and bits of clod and sticks. A moment before, hundreds of ants were trudging around a tiny pool, the water lined with ant handrails, and in shallow places, veritable formicine pontoons,—large ants which stood up to their bodies in water, with the booty-laden host passing over ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... angels nearest God, The ineffable true of heart around the throne, There shall I find you waiting when the flown Dream leaves my heart insentient as the clod; And when the grief-retracing ways I trod Become a shining path to thee alone, My weary feet, that seemed to drag as stone, Shall once again, with wings of fleetness shod, Fare on, beloved, to find you! Just beyond The seraph throng await me, standing ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... started through the brine, and as the succeeding roller came on, she was urging ahead fast. Still, the sea struck her abeam, forcing her bodily to leeward, and heaving the lower yardarms into the ocean. Tons of water fell on her decks, with the dull sound of the clod on the coffin. At this grand moment, old Jack Truck, who was standing in the rigging, dripping with he spray, that had washed over him, with a naked head, and his grey hair glistening, shouted like a Stentor, "Haul in your fore-braces, ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... stuff in him, that boy. He's as truthful as Edith; an appalling tribute, I know—but you like it in a cub. And there's no flapdoodle about him; and he never cried baby in his life. And he has imagination and music and poetry! Edith is a nice little clod compared to him." ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... 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. ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... heat of the affections into a clod which absorbs all that is poured into it, but never warms beneath the sunshine of smiles or the pressure of hand or lip,—this is the great martyrdom of sensitive beings,—most of all in that perpetual auto da fe where young womanhood ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... an amused smile. It pleased him to see his brain waking up, eager, vehement. As for Ben, crouching there, if they talked of him like a clod, heedless that his face deepened in stupor, that his eyes had caught a strange, gloomy treachery,—we all do the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... great leader of the hosts of God, Warrer with Satan for the body of him Whom living, God had loved—If cherubim With cherubim contend for one poor clod Of human dust, with sin-stained feet that trod Through the wide deserts of Heaven's chastisement— Are there not ministering angels sent To strive with evil ones that roam abroad Clutching our living souls? 'The living, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 447 - Volume 18, New Series, July 24, 1852 • Various
... 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 behold it ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... youth I look to these very skies, And probing their immensities, I found God there, his visible power; Yet felt in my heart, amid all its sense Of the power, an equal evidence That his love, there too, was the nobler dower. For the loving worm within its clod, Were diviner than a loveless god Amid his worlds, I will dare to say. You know what I mean: God's all, man's nought: But also, God, whose pleasure brought Man into being, stands away As it were a handbreadth off, to give Room for the ...
— Christmas Eve • Robert Browning
... to second it, which they performed with so much vigor, that the Tyrians retired, and the town was carried that very day. The next place he sat down before was Gaza, one of the largest cities of Syria, where this accident befell him. A large bird flying over him, let a clod of earth fall upon his shoulder, and then settling upon one of the battering engines, was suddenly entangled and caught in the nets composed of sinews, which protected the ropes with which the machine was managed. This fell out exactly according to Aristander's prediction, which ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... "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 young ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... wonder at and rejoice for thy wisdom? What a thing is this, that thy soul and its welfare should be more in thy esteem than all those glories wherewith the eyes of the world are dazzled! Surely thou hast looked upon the sun, and that makes gold look like a clod ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... break my lance with him, to challenge him in disguise to single combat, and prove my skill in arms against him. Ah, foolish heart, whither fled thy presumption? Could I but exchange my youth with all its aspirations for the clod of earth under his feet, I should deem it a most precious grace. I know not in what whirlpool of thought I was lost, when suddenly I saw him vanish through the trees. O foolish woman, neither didst thou greet him, nor speak a word, nor beg ...
— Chitra - A Play in One Act • Rabindranath Tagore
... life. I have not a happy moment. It is all rasped, and warped, and unlovely. I am nothing, and I know it; and I had rather, for my own comfort, be like the most of those who surround me—nothing, and not know it. Sometimes I can not help asking myself why I was made as I am. Why can't I be a clod, a plodder, and drag my way with stupid good nature through this miserable world, instead of chafing and ...
— Ester Ried • Pansy (aka. Isabella M. Alden)
... her cocoon rivals that of the 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 ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... laugh at it. He has a theory of his own. He maintains that God set this planet whirling, then turned away for a moment to start another universe or something. He says that when the Creator glances back at us again, to find this poor, scrubby little earth-family divided over its clod, the strong robbing the weak in the midst of plenty for all—enslaving them to starve and toil and fight, spending more for war than would keep the entire family in luxury; that when God looks closer, in his amazement, and finds that, next to greed, ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... were present, fixed on her in solemn expectation, and the effect was instantaneous; the maiden really wept, and she gained no inconsiderable sympathy, and some reputation for a tender heart, from the spectators. The muscles of the peddler's face were seen to move, and as the first clod of earth fell on the tenement of his father, sending up that dull, hollow sound that speaks so eloquently the mortality of man, his whole frame was for an instant convulsed. He bent his body down, ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... the charms of the woodland warblers to pierce with dulcet note the inmost fortresses of your heart buttressed to strong resistance against my awkward protestations of undying love? Nature has taught these creatures of the wild to woo with a finer art. Man is but a clod—too sordid to rise on wings of song into that vast expanse of heaven, a woman's heart. Let ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... here I am, discontented and moping because everything has turned out as I then wished. Don't see as I'm to blame, either. She had no business to grow so pretty. Then she looked like a ghost, but now when the color comes into her cheeks, and her blue eyes sparkle, a man would be a stupid clod if he didn't look with all his eyes and feel his heart a-thumping. That she should change so wasn't in the bargain; neither was it that she should read aloud in such sweet tones that a fellow'd like to listen to the dictionary; ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... FUROR. Vile, muddy clod of base, unhallowed clay, Thou slimy-sprighted, unkind Saracen, When thou wert born, Dame Nature cast her calf; For age and time hath made thee a great ox, And now thy grinding jaws devour quite The fodder due to ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... did not wait for them to return. "One can't accomplish anything with a clod-hopper like that," he said. "I But in the end if you don't come around and pay us up regularly, we will—" He felt for the legal documents in his pocket, realized by their crackling that they were still ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... know that I am proscribed as 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 heavy ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... burn'd; And all the shrouds, wherewith my life should sail, Are turned to one thread, one little hair: My heart hath one poor string to stay it by, Which holds but till thy news be uttered; And then all this thou seest is but a clod, ...
— King John • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... eloquence order the matter, is not to be conceived almost: so pleasant a thing it is to hear him plead. Then at noon by coach home, and thither by and by comes cozen Turner, and The., and Joyce, in their riding-clod: they being come from their lodgings to her husbands chamber, at the Temple, and there do lie, and purpose to go out of town on Friday next; and here I had a good dinner for them. After dinner by water to White Hall, where the Duke of York did meet our Office, ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... me! I fear All may not doubt, but everywhere Some must clasp Idols. Yet, my God, Whom call I Idol? Let Thy dove Shadow me over, and my sins Be unremember'd, and Thy love Enlighten me. Oh teach me yet Somewhat before the heavy clod Weighs on me, and the busy fret Of that sharp-headed worm begins In the ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... daring 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 ...
— Little Downy - The History of A Field-Mouse • Catharine Parr Traill |
