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Clod

noun
1.
A compact mass.  Synonyms: ball, chunk, clump, glob, lump.
2.
An awkward stupid person.  Synonyms: gawk, goon, lout, lubber, lummox, lump, oaf, stumblebum.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Clod" Quotes from Famous Books



... no longer," continued Kraken. "Formerly everyone fled at my approach. I carried away hens and rabbits in my bag; I drove sheep and pigs, cows, and oxen before me. To-day these clod-hoppers keep a good guard; they sit up at night. Just now I was pursued in the village of Anis by doughty labourers armed with flails and scythes and pitchforks. I had to drop the hens and rabbits, ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France

... hopeless trying to make this clod understand. His brain was not built with the right cells for understanding me. 'Lord Southminster,' I said, turning upon him and clasping my hands, 'I will not go away while you stop here. But you have some spark enough of a gentleman in your composition, ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen

... 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 ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London

... of Progress! Maximilian smiled scornfully on himself. He was only a clod of grit caught in the world's great wheels. The foreign substance had wrought a discordant screech for a moment, and then was mercilessly ground into powder and thrust out of the bearings. He pondered on the first days ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle

... former. But, Lord! to see how he did with his admirable 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, and went with us to ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys

... in him, she felt, strengthened the secret bond that existed between them. A thousand times she had whispered to herself of the matter. "He is groping about, trying to find himself," she thought. "He is not a dull clod, all words and smartness. Within him there is a secret something that is striving to grow. It is the thing I let be killed ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson

... I will none of him—the dull clod, who is called the son of Pharaoh. Moreover, he is my half-brother, and it is not meet that I should wed my brother. For nature cries aloud against the ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang

... furrow heaved and bubbled, and out of every clod rose a man. Out of the earth they rose by thousands, each clad from head to foot in steel, and drew their swords and rushed on Jason, where he stood in the midst alone. Then the Minuai grew pale with fear for him; ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various

... his governess, and took a certain pride and pleasure in his young intelligence. It was well that she had something real to interest her, for her character was in strong contrast to her nephew's. She lived mainly in an ideal world, and her life was fed by what she fetched up from the clod or down from the clouds. Chiefly by the former. She was "of imagination all compact;" but that is a very unlucky case where there is weak judgment, little or no keenness of observation, a treacherous memory, and a boundless longing for the ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow

... Gone is the strength of life, gone all its pride! Dismiss thine aged soldiers to their deaths. How shameless is our prayer! Not on hard turf To stretch our dying limbs; nor seek in vain, When parts the soul, a hand to close our eyes; Not with the helmet strike the stony clod: (19) Rather to feel the dear one's last embrace, And gain a humble but a separate tomb. Let nature end old age. And dost thou think We only know not what degree of crime Will fetch the highest price? What thou canst dare These years ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan

... and intelligent beings can not have been formed by a blind, brute, insensible being. There is certainly some difference between a clod and the ideas of Newton. Newton's intelligence came ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard

... step; his brow throbbed; a thousand darting pains shot through his brain. But for the moment these physical pangs were as nothing; disappointment, self-reproach moved him. To have allowed himself to go down like that; to have been caught by such a simple trick! Clumsy clod!—and at a moment when—He laughed fiercely; from his head the blood flowed; he did not feel ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham

... there?—and then up the servants' stairs. I dried my face on a towel, rejoicing that the derringer blow had left little damage, and opened the door leading to the upper story. It was a narrow stairway, rather dark, but the first thing to catch my eye was a small clod of yellow dirt on the second step, and this was still damp—the foot from which it had fallen must have passed within a very short time. I had the fellow—had him like a rat in a trap. Oh, well, there was time enough, and I closed ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish

... gladly enlighten 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 a ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda

... but 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

... he would; and you must at least allow me to know more about him than you do. And so I ask you whether it is common-sense to tell him what's going to happen, for the sake of a few clod-hoppers, who matter ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts

... 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, boys! away with the yard, like a ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper

... known as Plez, his whole name being Pleasant Valley, an inspiration to his mother from the label on a grape box, which had drifted into that region from the North. He had just stooped to pick up a clod of earth with which to accentuate his vociferations, when, on rising, he was astounded by the apparition of an elderly woman wearing a purple sun-bonnet, and carrying a furled umbrella of the same color. Behind the spectacles, which were fixed upon him, blazed a pair of fiery eyes, and the ...
— The Late Mrs. Null • Frank Richard Stockton

... away to the cloudy November sky, and the lords and ladies gay, and the hounds, and the frosty-faced, short-tempered old huntsman, the very perfection of his kind; and the poor cockney snobs on their hired screws, and the meek clod-hopping labourers looking on excited and bewildered, happy for a moment at beholding so ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier

... hear! and a worse hell on earth! [Aside. What mad profusion on this clod-born birth! Abyss of joys, as if heaven meant to shew What, in base matters, such a hand could do: Or was his virtue spent, and he no more With angels could supply the exhausted store, Of which I swept the sky? And wanting subjects to his ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden

... distance of several rods. Then, seeing a clod of dirt lying in the road, he picked it up and hurled it at the boys. He was not a good thrower, but as luck would have it the clod struck Randy on the shoulder, some of the dirt spattering up into ...
— Randy of the River - The Adventures of a Young Deckhand • Horatio Alger Jr.

... life in the clod suggests to Bryant by contrast the thought of death; and there is nowhere in his poetry a passage of deeper feeling than the closing stanzas of June, in which he speaks of himself, by anticipation, as ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... lately animated clod, Who self despised, and glorified his God; And when that great decisive day shall come, He'll rise ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter

... 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 in ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe

... credit. Richard Cleave and Allan, entering, found a fire, and Tullius nodding beside it. At their step he roused himself, rose, and put on another log. He was a negro of sixty years, tall and hale, a dignified master of foraging, a being simple and taciturn and strong, with a love for every clod of earth at Three Oaks where he ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston

... If suddenly a clod of earth should rise, And walk about, and breathe, and speak, and love, How one would tremble, and in what ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various

... him just what to do; and then he turned into a clod of earth, and stuck himself between Dapple's hoof and shoe on the near forefoot. So the Princess hunted up and down, out and in, everywhere; at last she came into the stable, and wanted to go into Dapplegrim's loose box. ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various

... finished the first lion with a shot about the heart, and brought the second to a standstill by disabling him in his hind quarters. He quickly crept into a dense, wide, dark green bush, in which for a long time it was impossible to obtain a glimpse of him. At length, a clod of earth falling near his hiding-place, he made a move which disclosed to me his position, when I finished him with three more shots, all along the middle of his back. Carey swam across the river to flog off the dogs; and when these came through to me, I beat up the peninsula in quest ...
— Forest & Frontiers • G. A. Henty

... a little slice after all of the whole. You will then believe what I have advanced, that there are no 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 I have called the alchemy of nature. Let us not be too entirely mechanical, Baconian, ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies

... knuckles, thick fingers, an ugly face, a broad back, long heels. Toddle-shankie also came sunburnt, having scarred feet, a broken nose, called Theow. Their children were named: the boys,—Sooty, Cowherd, Clumsy, Clod, Bastard, Mud, Log, Thickard, Laggard, Grey Coat, Lout, and Stumpy; the girls,—Loggie, Cloggie, Lumpy [ Leggie], Snub-nosie, Cinders, Bond-maid, Woody [ Peggy], Tatter-coatie, Crane-shankie. The story seems ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... courage and skill to him that can get it." This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. And also the only real tragedy in life is the being used by personally minded men for purposes which you recognize to be base. All the rest is at worst mere misfortune or mortality: this alone ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw

... my clod-hopper, "into thy perjured mouth. 'Tis herself sends me here to avenge the best, the most injured . . . " Here he fell a-blubbering! Oh, Belford, the virtue of this world is a ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang

... 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 ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson

... they were out walking in the early spring morning. A Shore-lark on a clod whistled prettily as it ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton

... 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

... that goes to the sparkling rill Too oft gets broken at last, There are scores of others its place to fill When its earth to the earth is cast; Keep that pitcher at home, let it never roam, But lie like a useless clod, Yet sooner or later the hour will come When its chips are ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon

... the making of dog-stealers and gin-drinkers, such as their parents were; and the child of the average English tradesman or peasant, even at this day, well schooled, will show no innate disposition such as must fetter him forever to the clod or the counter. You say that many a boy runs away, or would run away if he could, from good positions to go to sea. Of course he does. I never said I should have any difficulty in finding sailors, but I shall in finding fishmongers. I am at no loss for ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin

... furiously began to loathe Bolas. He was furious with himself for having "lowered himself" to Bolas. Bolas in his ignorance no doubt thought the books were a cheap charity of cast-off lumber. Uncouth clod! Stupid clod! Uncouth parish! Hateful, loathsome parish! For weeks he kept away from Hailsham and the possible vicinity of Bolas. One day he met him. Bolas passed with no more than a "Good day, Mr. Aubyn." He could have killed the man. He swung round and pushed his dark face and jutty nose ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson

... was no doubt ill-prepared, while turning the clod, to receive into his soul the sweet influences of rural life, and by reason of their elevating beauty, to be fortified against those drawbacks and trials with ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington

... ground—walking so slowly, and with his lean frame so bent that I might have supposed him ill if I had not remarked the steady movement of his head from right to left, and the alert touch with which he now and again displaced a clod of earth or a cluster of leaves. By-and-by he rose stiffly, and looked round him suspiciously; but by that time I had slipped behind a trunk, and was not to be seen; and after a brief interval he went back to his task, stooping over it more closely, if possible, than ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman

... from Greer. The Englishman's fine-grained stomach was covered with pink welts from his punishment. He had ceased smiling and was watching his man carefully. As a matter of fact, he had expected to dispose of Greer easily—as a gentleman disposes of a clod-hopper. But the heavy-set boy's method of fighting was new and effective. Likewise there seemed to be a ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling

... ashamed to say I have forgotten—did all the churning of the farm-dairy by imparting his motive power to a wheel. This piece of ingenuity, Farmer informed me, was originally and exclusively an inspiration from the intellect which animated his, Farmer's, proper clod; nor was he greatly exhilarated when I narrated to him the tradition of the turnspit, whose memory, I regret to record, he spurned as that of a "mean cuss," destitute of that poetry which dwelleth in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various

... forget not thou,—earth's honored priest, Its tongue, its soul, its life, its pulse, its heart,— In earth's great chorus to sustain thy part! Chiefest of guests at Love's ungrudging feast, Play not the niggard; spurn thy native clod, And self disown; Live to thy neighbor; live unto thy God; ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders

... us not 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 ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... if it lyes not far from these landings, they must trust to the Seamen for their careful rolling it on board of their sloops and shallops...." A second common mode of transportation, according to Philip A. Bruce, was "not to draw the cask over the ground by means of horses or oxen, like an enormous clod crusher, the custom of a later period, but to propel it by the application of a steady force from behind." In 1724 Hugh Jones wrote, "The tobacco is rolled, drawn by horses, or carted to convenient Rolling Houses, whence it is conveyed on board the ships in ...
— Tobacco in Colonial Virginia - "The Sovereign Remedy" • Melvin Herndon

... had to learn it too; but when the Bridge Farmer doubted that, and told the priest, if that was the case, to celebrate mass once in Greek, and he would pay whatever it cost, his Reverence grew abusive and called the Bridge Farmer an impudent clod-hopper. Because he didn't know what ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various

... honest and who knew you strong; Racy of homely earth, yet spirit-fired With all their higher moods felt, loved, desired. Puritan, yet of no ascetic strain Or arid straitness, freshening as the rain And healthy as the clod; a native force Incult yet quickening, cleaving its straight course Unchecked, unchastened, conquering to the end. Crudeness may chill, and confidence offend, But manhood, mother wit, and selfless zeal, Speech clear as light, and courage true as steel Must win the many. Honest soul and ...
— Punch, Or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, Feb. 13, 1892 • Various

... so odd the way you have changed. You used to speak of him as though he was merely a clod of a farmer, and of her as a stupid old maid. Now, nothing is too good to say ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope

... and blood, lustihood. hugeness &c adj.; enormity, immensity, monstrosity. giant, Brobdingnagian, Antaeus, Goliath, Gog and Magog, Gargantua, monster, mammoth, Cyclops; cachalot, whale, porpoise, behemoth, leviathan, elephant, hippopotamus; colossus; tun, cord, lump, bulk, block, loaf, mass, swad, clod, nugget, bushel, thumper, whooper, spanker, strapper; Triton among the minnows [Coriolanus]. mountain, mound; heap &c (assemblage) 72. largest portion &c 50; full size, life size. V. be large &c adj.; become large &c (expand) 194. Adj. large, big; great &c (in quantity) 31; considerable, bulky, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... 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 ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise

... 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. ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley

... perched in the old pines in the morass; above all, the darkness of the room, the deep silence, the loneliness, gave wings to the maid's fancy. Everything became instinct with life: a creature sighed in every tree, a voice spoke from every stone, something gasped for air under every clod of earth, something lurked in every pool. The branches that tapped against the window-panes were the fingers of the dead, the stars that shot across the heavens were wandering souls, and the clouds and winds were ...
— Absolution • Clara Viebig

... die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice; To be imprison'd in the viewless winds, And blown with restless violence round ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett

... 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

... luminous and 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

... all night he weeps, and 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

... in the account of sinners, while angels 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 of clay ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... of wheat from clod, She knows, nor growth of man in grisly brute; But he, the flower at head and soil at root, Is miracle, guides he the brute to God. And that way seems he bound; that way the road, With his dark-lantern mind, unled, alone, Wearifully through ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... a clod, intent On being just an earthly thing, I'd be that rare embodiment Of Heart and Spirit, Voice and Wing, With pure, ecstatic, rapture-sent, Divinely-tender twittering That Echo swoons to re-present,— A bluebird ...
— Songs of Friendship • James Whitcomb Riley

... 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

... understand?" I asked indignantly. "The thing you have seen and felt has been in this world long enough for every man to understand. Eve used it upon Adam. I can't understand? Damme, sir, do you think I am a clod? I have felt ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major

... accent more, that of love, without which the hymn is not complete; and there is another human order of Being to speak that accent. Man includes in himself all the preceding orders of Being, with all the notes of their praise: the material clod, for is he not made of dust; the plant, for he has an outward growth and circulation—the animal, for he has instinct and feeling; while reason and conscience and spiritual affection he has peculiarly and alone; so that Power, Wisdom, Goodness ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various

... settles the share More deep in the grudging clod; For he saith: "The wheat is my care, And the rest is the ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

... she had to pant for breath and her limbs staggered under her. But she would be all right if she could sit down for one moment. There was a hawthorn stump a little way off, and to this she made her way, but as she sunk down on it a clod of earth struck her in the shoulder. She spun round, and another broke on her face. Grit filled her mouth, which was open with amazement. She had been deaf with physical distress, so she had not heard that the boys had gathered ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West

... peculiar splendour, but at night appear most brilliant; so do women. * * * * Comets confound the most learned, when they attempt to ascertain their nature; so do women. Comets equally excite the admiration of the philosopher, and of the clod of the valley; so do women. Comets and women, therefore are closely analogous: but the nature of each being inscrutable, all that remains for us to do is, to view with admiration the one, and almost to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 480, Saturday, March 12, 1831 • Various

... to set mine eye: The tackle of my heart is crack'd and 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]

... the one final, overpowering, directing resolution. There is no passion more persistent than that which leads to self-destruction. In the midst of the blinding swirl of his thought he maintained his purpose to put himself above the world of human effort and to become a brother of the clod, to ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland

... strike me ugly! Sir Tun. 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 I ...
— Scarborough and the Critic • Sheridan

... Ash and Thorns, by all Old memories of Sussex sod, To you we pile the altar clod ...
— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley

... is in good order: but if some part harder than the rest resists the pressure, it will be clear that the ploughing has been badly done. When the ploughmen see this done from time to time they are not guilty of clod hopping. ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato

... the spirit, Gieszet hinein! The life of the bowl; Leben dem Leben Man is an earth-clod Gibt er allein. Unwarmed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various

... bent under him. "Ah! My lord! O'Kiku grasps my neck!" A cold hand laid upon him he shrieked in fear. Shu[u]zen turned—"Fool! 'Tis a clod of snow from the tree above, fallen on your collar. Off with you to bed. Truly in these days such fellows are good for nothing." Off he strode to the ro[u]ka. For a moment he looked out—on the heavy flakes coming down like cotton wadding, at the figure of ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville

... cleaner. I confess that the knight's love for Dulcinea del Tobosa moves me to tears. I never can smile or jest at him when his heart and lips hold with fealty to an ideal love. His love created her. He found her a clod, but flung her into the sky and made her a star. Is not this love's uniform history? Blinded, not of lust or ambition, but of ideality. Saul met Christ at noon, and was blinded by his vision; and would not all brave ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle

... image. Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again, And, lost each human trace, surrendering up Thine individual being, shalt thou go To mix forever with the elements, To be a brother to the insensible rock And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various

... 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 ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare

... the sealed package for Pliny. A question from his master gave him a chance to tell Marcus's story, which lost nothing in the friendly, rustic narration. A chorus of praise for the boy rose from the eager listeners. Even Quadratilla remarked that he was a decent little clod-hopper, as she demanded a lamp by which to examine her jewel. Pliny and Calpurnia's eyes met in swift response to each other's thoughts. They examined the farmer's seal and questioned Lucius more closely. Calpurnia's ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson

... appearance and attire, whose senses are all collected (for devotion to the true objects of life), whose purposes are never left unaccomplished,[914] who bears himself with equal friendliness towards all creatures, who regards a clod of earth and a lump of gold with an equal eye, who is equally disposed towards friend and foe, who is possessed of patience, who takes praise and blame equally,[915] who is free from longing with respect to all objects of desire, who practises Brahmacharya, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown

... the ship, at the instant of her final disaster, and very many fragments were thrown around her; a few even on her decks. Among the last was a human body, which was cast a great distance in the air, and fell, like a heavy clod, across the gunwale of the sloop. This proved to be the body of Waally, one of the arms having been cut away by a shot, three hours before! Thus perished a constant and most wily enemy of the colony, and who had, ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper

... who knows in winter tramp, Or the midnight of the camp, What revealings faint and far, Stealing down from moon and star, Kindled in that human clod Thought ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various

... 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, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various

... 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

... either positively, as being inhabitants of a world of their own, or negatively, as not being of my world. I was not a reflective boy, but my mind proceeded upon flashes, by leaps of intuition. When I was moved I could conceive anything, everything; when I was unmoved I was as dull as a clod. It was idle to tell me to think. I could only think when I was moved from within to think. That made me the despair of my father and the vessel of my schoolmaster's wrath. So here I saw no relationship whatsoever between the two appearances. Now, of course, I ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett

... eh? And just listen to his plan. He had some olive oil sent to him from Saint-Firmin, his village, and then he tramped the streets and found a market for the oil among well-to-do families from Provence living in Paris. Unfortunately, it did not last. He is such a clod-hopper that they showed him the door on all sides. And as there was a jar of oil left which nobody would buy, well, old man, we live upon it. Yes, on the days when we happen to have some bread we dip our ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola

... at top o' t' clod, Thy heead cocked o' one side, Lookin' as far-learnt as a judge. Is that a worrm thou's spied? By t' Megs! he's well-nigh six inch lang, An' reed as t' gate i' t' park; If thou don't mesh him up a bit, He'll ...
— Songs of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman

... 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 cause of the aggregate ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut

... been called a "Clod hopper." As he read the following, he wondered whether or not Uncle Zed had not also been so designated, and had written ...
— Dorian • Nephi Anderson

... fear of worse To me, and to my offspring, would torment me With cruel expectation. Yet one doubt Pursues me still, lest all I cannot die; Lest that pure breath of life, the spirit of Man Which God inspired, cannot together perish With this corporeal clod; then, in the grave, Or in some other dismal place, who knows But I shall die a living death? O thought Horrid, if true! Yet why? It was but breath Of life that sinned; what dies but what had life And sin? The body properly had neither, All of me then shall die: let this appease The doubt, ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton

... statement with the observed facts of life. Here is a garden, well-planted and watered. The soil is loamy and black. On all its surface there is nothing, save a clod here and there, to relieve the warm, moist regularity. Come to-morrow and the level surface is broken by tiny green shoots which have appeared at intervals, thrusting through the top crust. Next week the black earth is striped with rows of green. Onions, ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing

... at peace Is centred in itself, taking alike Pleasure and pain; heat, cold; glory and shame. He is the Yogi, he is Yukta, glad With joy of light and truth; dwelling apart Upon a peak, with senses subjugate Whereto the clod, the rock, the glistering gold Show all as one. By this sign is he known Being of equal grace to comrades, friends, Chance-comers, strangers, lovers, enemies, Aliens and kinsmen; loving all alike, Evil ...
— The Bhagavad-Gita • Sir Edwin Arnold

... threshing floor, O toiling worker ant, I rear a memorial to thee of a thirsty clod, that even in death the ear- nurturing furrow of Demeter may lull thee as thou ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail

... 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 ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons

... anguish; flew towards the house, and in a moment, was again on the spot, bearing the priest's torch. He raised his brother's head. One hand was extended over the body, and fell to the earth like a clod of clay ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman

... His farm, of course, would be managed under his superintendence—unless Oklahoma City should be generous enough to spread out and surround it, and lap it up, town-lot after town-lot, till not a red clod was left.... And if a girl like Lahoma—for surely she had not changed!—if she, little Lahoma.... And the longing grew on him to see Annabel Sellimer and Lahoma together, that he might study the girl he had once loved with the girl he might ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis

... Lubbock's.... Fitzmaurice, Fawcett, and I went for a walk to the oak under which Wilberforce decided to abolish slavery, and, strolling on, came to a stile, where we were doubtful of our way. Fawcett sat down, and Fitzmaurice, looking for the road, cried out: "Here comes a clod. We will ask him." The slouching labourer was Lord Derby, as we recognized with a loud laugh, joined in with terrific shouting by Fawcett as we privately informed him of the cause, at which Lord Derby was no doubt astonished. However, he did as well as the yokel, for he ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn

... little black-coated, yellow-faced duodecimo,—speak to the forlorn and forsaken, who have been doing dusty penance upon cloistered shelves in silent alcoves for a century, with none so poor to do them reverence,—read here one little catch which came from lips long ago as silent as the clod which they are kissing, and there some forgotten fragment of history, too insignificant to make its way into the world's magnificent chronologies,—snapping up unconsidered trifles of anecdote,—tasting some long-interred ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various

... clod! Digged from the earth like a base common sod; I wonder at thee, and thy power to hold The world in bond to thee, thou yellow gold! Yet do I sadly own thy fascination, And would I gladly show my estimation By ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor

... never think on any subject that it is so, but only whether it is so, and dispute about it; and when the thinking principle proceeds no further than this, they appear only to tread and trample on a single clod, and not to advance." Upon this I approached the assembly, and lo! they appeared to me to be good-looking men and well dressed; but the angels said, "This is their appearance when viewed in their own light; but if light from heaven flows in, their faces are changed, and ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg

... custom the people had when they bought and sold land. They used to cut out a clod and hand it over to the buyer, and you weren't lawfully seized of your land—it didn't really belong to you—till the other fellow had actually given you a piece of it—like this.' He ...
— Puck of Pook's Hill • Rudyard Kipling

... a clod of earth out of the ground, but could not do so, even with his knife, for the ground was as hard as ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa

... till God make men of some other metal than earth. Would it not grieve a woman to be over-mastered 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 ...
— Much Ado About Nothing • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]

... clod; what ails thee now, thou wretched fellow? Canst thou neither cut thy swathe straight, as thou wert wont to do, nor keep time with thy neighbour in thy reaping, but thou must fall out, like an ewe that is foot-pricked with a thorn ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang

... then that that uncouth man in tow trousers was yet to be the foremost editor in America, and a candidate, unwisely, for President of the United States. Horace Greeley, for it was he, who sat before me, has been often described as a man with the "face of an angel, and the walk of a clod-hopper." Ten years later I became well acquainted with him, and from that time a most cordial friendship existed until his dying day. He visited me as a speaker at our State convention in Trenton, N.Y. I had him at my house at supper when my mother asked him if ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler

... enthusiasm of Devotion or Poetry. Tell me, my dear 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

... process of the night, The stars themselves a purer light Give out, than reaches those who gaze Enshrouded with the valley's haze. October, entering Heaven's fane, Assumes her lucent, annual reign: Then what a dark and dismal clod, Forsaken by the Sons of God, Seems this sad world, to those which march Across the high, illumined arch, And with their brightness draw me forth To scan the splendors of the North! I see the Dragon, as he toils With Ursa in his shining coils, And mark the Huntsman lift his shield, Confronting ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various

... short, in a million disguises Never created a crankier clod, More unaccountably made of surprises, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 1, 1914 • Various

... of mighty bone and thews, sons of Anak, to our own certain knowledge, arise in Kendal, Wakefield, Bradford and Leeds; huge men, by thousands, amongst the spinners and weavers of Glasgow, Paisley, etc., well able to fight their way through battalions of clod-hoppers whose talk is of oxen. But, unless in times subject to special distress, it is not so easy to tempt away the weaver from his loom as the delver from his spade. We believe the reason to be, that the monotony of a rustic ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey

... There he lies, like a clod of earth; and there, too, will lie many more, in a few minutes. There is another! I did not notice him at first. Poor Dona Dolores! ...
— In New Granada - Heroes and Patriots • W.H.G. Kingston

... 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. The good parson ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis

... the night, Bell—I canna' eat—my thoughts will a' rin on that puir lass. Sae young—sae bonnie, an' a few months ago as blythe as a lark, an' now a clod o' the earth. Hout we maun all dee when our ain time comes; but, somehow, I canna' think that Jeanie ought ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie

... finiteness no longer resisted or deplored, but accepted,—just so far it ceases to be opaque and inert. The present seems trivial and squalid, because it is clutched and held fast,—the fugitive image petrified into an idol or a clod. But taken as it is, it becomes transparent, and reveals the fair ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various

... "Thou good-for-nothing clod! Thou hast spoiled the work with thy clumsy handling! Why canst not leave alone what thou dost not understand? Who gave permission to change? Body of me! Must I stand over thee every hour in the day and switch thy hands ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor

... It was then 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 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 384, May 12, 1883 • Various

... find himself the centre of interest, and feel unutterably uncomfortable in the discovery. Being obliged to say something, he would mine his brain and put in a blast and when the smoke and flying debris had cleared away the result would be what seemed to him but a poor little intellectual clod of dirt or two, and then he would be astonished to see everybody as lost in admiration as if he had brought up a ton or two of virgin gold. Every remark he made delighted his hearers and compelled their applause; he overheard people say he was exceedingly bright—they were chiefly ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 4. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner

... the boss and I want to tell the boss the next time he tries to make a scapegoat out of me before a lot of church people he'll hear something he won't like. I'm no clod-hopper to have you make me appear a rowdy. You daddy your ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field

... females, who 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, as if in pain, his fingers worked while the hands hung ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper

... one mass united mix, So bricks attraction feel for kindred bricks; Some in the cellar view, perchance, on high, Fair chimney chums on beds of mortar lie; Enamour'd of the sympathetic clod, Leaps the red bridegroom to the labourer's hod: And up the ladder bears the workman, taught To think he bears the bricks—mistaken thought! A proof behold! if near the top they find The nymphs or broken-corner'd or unkind, Back to the base, "resulting with a bound," {67} They bear ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith

... just as he is bidden, but I want him to carry himself like the man and monarch he was made to be. I want him to stay where he is put, yet not as if he were put there, but as if he had taken his position deliberately. But, of all things, to have a man act as if he were a clod just emerged for the first time from his own barnyard! Upon this occasion, however, I was too much absorbed in my errand to note anybody's demeanor, and I threaded straightway the crowd of customers, went up to the counter, and inquired in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various

... will 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

... June Is out of tune With love and God; The rose his rival reigns, The stars reject his pains, His home the clod! ...
— Poems • Mary Baker Eddy

... treasure in it is conceal'd: The place, precisely, I don't know, But industry will serve to show. The harvest past, Time's forelock take, And search with plough, and spade, and rake; Turn over every inch of sod, Nor leave unsearch'd a single clod." The father died. The sons—and not in vain— Turn'd o'er the soil, and o'er again; That year their acres bore More grain than e'er before. Though hidden money found they none, Yet had their father wisely done, To show by such a measure, That toil ...
— A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine

... bride!" said gallant Captain Todd, "She's mine, uninteresting clod, My own, my darling charmer!" "Oh, dear," said she, "you're just too late, I'm married to, I beg to ...
— Bab Ballads and Savoy Songs • W. S. Gilbert

... 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 to greater ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede

... come to the man alone; 'Tis then, if ever, he talks with God, And views himself as a single clod In the soil of life where the souls are grown. 'Tis then he questions the why and where, The start and end of his years and days, And what is blame and what is praise, And what is ugly and ...
— The Path to Home • Edgar A. Guest



Words linked to "Clod" :   coagulum, clumsy person, clew, gob, clot, stumblebum, agglomeration, lout



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