"Plod" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... How could I plod through the dull routine of an agent's work, or interest myself in the thatch of this tenant's bothy or the sails of that one's boat, when my mind was taken up by the chain of events which I have described, and was still busy seeking ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... grew fewer, and Felicia, looking across at her brother's brown, handsome face, found it tranquil and sober, an earnest absorption in his gray eyes and a gently whimsical smile about his mouth. She knew of whom he was thinking, and smiled tenderly herself as she watched his big hand plod systematically and doggedly across the unfamiliar way. Bedtime found Ken elated and exhibiting to his sister several ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... submit. Submission would come easier if you took up some of those neglected duties, and you would be stronger for patience, if you used more of your strength for service. You do well if you do not sink under your burden, but you would do better if, with it on your shoulders, you would plod steadily along the road; and if you did, you would feel the weight less. It seems heaviest when you stand still doing nothing. Do not cease to toil because you suffer. You will feel your pain more if you ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... the cart, the hewer of wood and drawer of water, is a tall, wiry, bronze-colored Hindu. He has a yard of white gauze about his waist, and another yard twisted up into a turban on his head. The dictates of fashion do not interest him. He does not plod along year in and year out behind his team for the pittance of sixty cents per day, to squander on the outside of his person. Not he. He has a wife up near Simla. He hopes to go back next year, and buy a bit of ground back from the hill on the Allabadd road from his father-in-law, ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... celebrate your father's exequies. But is that wicked Gaveston return'd? K. Edw. Ay, priest, and lives to be reveng'd on thee, That wert the only cause of his exile. Gav. 'Tis true; and, but for reverence of these robes, Thou shouldst not plod one foot beyond this place. Bish. of Cov. I did no more than I was bound to do: And, Gaveston, unless thou be reclaim'd, As then I did incense the parliament, So will I now, and thou shalt back to France. Gav. Saving your reverence, you must ...
— Edward II. - Marlowe's Plays • Christopher Marlowe
... the violin, and not one of the lads can, though they want to do it very much. But, best of all, Nat, you really care to learn something, and that is half the battle. It seems hard at first, and you will feel discouraged, but plod away, and things will get easier and ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... differently spent in composing verses more execrable than the bellman's. [484] His time however was not always so absurdly wasted. He had that sort of industry and that sort of exactness which would have made him a respectable antiquary or King at Arms. His taste led him to plod among old records; and in that age it was only by plodding among old records that any man could obtain an accurate and extensive knowledge of the law of Parliament. Having few rivals in this laborious and unattractive pursuit, he soon began to be regarded as an oracle on questions ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... when they came face to face with life they would get smashed; but housework tempers the matter powerfully; and man's work out among other men; and then when children come and you have to contrive and pinch, why you just plod along and don't ever get flustered. It's just the first dash of cold water in the face, child; after that all lives is pretty ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... wished to do so—that the obscure power that moved him had an exact meaning, and that its meaning was in accordance with his will. His free instinct, risen from the unconscious depths, was willy-nilly forced to plod on under the yoke of reason with perfectly clear ideas which had nothing at all in common with it. And work so produced was no more than a lying juxtaposition of one of those great subjects that Christophe's mind had marked out for itself, and those wild forces which had an altogether ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... "is my home. It is always a pleasure to me to see smiling faces, to see men and women who walk as though every footstep were taking them nearer to happiness. Have you never noticed, monsieur," he continued, "the difference? They do not plod here as do your English people. There is a buoyancy in their footsteps, a mirth in their laughter, an expectancy in the way they look around, as though adventures were everywhere. I cannot understand it, but one feels it directly one sets ...
— The Lost Ambassador - The Search For The Missing Delora • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... reign there alone. So shalt thou rest, and what if thou withdraw In silence from the living, and no friend Take note of thy departure? All that breathe Will share thy destiny. The gay will laugh When thou art gone, the solemn brood of care Plod on, and each one as before will chase His favorite phantom; yet all these shall leave Their mirth and their employments, and shall come And make their bed with thee. As the long train Of ages glides away, the sons of men— The youth in life's green spring, and he who goes ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... incessant labor; the hard marches over a rough road, and under a broiling sun, at length became too oppressive. Oftentimes I felt, as it were, unable to proceed a step further; but my proud spirit with a stern determination of will, exerted every possible energy, and I continued day after day to plod along with my foot-sore and way-worn companions. Our fatigues were however occasionally relieved by a general rest for a few days. But before one third of the journey had been completed I was seized one night with a severe ...
— The Black-Sealed Letter - Or, The Misfortunes of a Canadian Cockney. • Andrew Learmont Spedon
... translated into action. The young student, dreaming the dreams of youth and pining for freedom and action, had more than once felt his gorge rise to the choking-point as he found himself forced to plod on among the dull, oppressive, unheroic facts of life; and those acts of official villainy against which Moor draws the sword he had himself seen flourishing unavenged in his native Wuerttemberg. But, on the other hand, he was never for a moment ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... After that it was plod-plod-plod, one day very much like another, cold with coldness of the sub-Arctic, the river a white band through heavy woods, nights that were crisp and still as death, the sky a vast dome sprinkled with flickering stars, brilliant at times with the Northern Lights, that strange glow that ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... see every little dyke or embankment with a crowd of bustling villagers, each with a heavy bundle of grain on his head, hurrying to and fro like a stream of busy ants. The women, with clothes tucked up above the knee, plod and plash through the water. They go at a half run, a kind of fast trot, and hardly a word is spoken—garnering the rice crops is too important an operation to dawdle and gossip over. Each hurries off with his burden to the little family threshing-floor, dumps down his load, gives a weary grunt, ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... an exercise healthful and good, For tuning the nerves and digesting the food— Graceful gymnastics for stirring the blood Without the gross purpose of use Ant, let me tell you 'tis not a la mode To plod like a pilgrim, and carry a load, Perverting the limbs that for grace were bestowed, By ...
— The Youth's Coronal • Hannah Flagg Gould
... the wagon and started homeward, but it was so dark that we had to plod along slowly. Old Sol was unusually torpid, as if the ominous obscurity had dazed him, too. After a time he stopped short and snorted; we heard the brush crackle and caught a glimpse of a large animal crossing the ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... wheresoe'er we tread Hover the spirits of our dead; We cannot see them as we could In bygone days, when near they stood And shared the joys and griefs that came, But they are with us just the same. They see us as we plod along, And proudly smile when we are strong, And sigh and grieve the self-same way When thoughtlessly ...
— The Path to Home • Edgar A. Guest
... as the rushing wind Bears the cloud onwards: in that Tale I find The furrows of long thought, and dried-up tears, Which, ebbing, leave a sterile track behind, O'er which all heavily the journeying years Plod the last sands of life,—where not a ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... grow fat. No other species will be quite so deformed and distorted. Athletics they will watch, yes, but on the whole sparingly practise. Their snuffy old scholars will even be proud to decry them. Where once the simians swung high through forests, or scampered like deer, their descendants will plod around farms, or mince along city streets, moving constrictedly, slowly, ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... the "rig" was that while it was a tongued wagon with whiffletrees for two horses, there was only one horse. The driver, a bearded farmer, was urging the patient animal on, although it was impossible for it to do more than plod in ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... there's some excuse for the more vigorous sports," Evelyn maintained. "Of course, you can't eliminate a certain amount of cruelty; but, admitting that, isn't it just as well that men who live in a luxurious civilization should be willing to plod through miles of heather after grouse, risk their limbs on horseback, or spend hours in cold water? These are bracing things; they imply some moral discipline. It really can't be nice to ride at a dangerous fence, or to flounder down a rapid after an otter ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... all when thou dost plod, Alone, upon these wintry days, Along the old familiar ways Wherein ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... forget the many agreeable hours we have passed in reading Horace and Virgil; and I think they are topics will never grow stale. Let us extend the Roman empire, and cultivate two barbarous towns o'er -run with rusticity and Mathematics. The creatures are so used to a circle, that they Plod on in the same eternal round, with their whole view confined to a punctum, cujus nulla est pars: "Their time a moment, and a ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... an iron ring in its nostrils, Covered with crimson cloth, and a cushion placed for a saddle. She should not walk, he said, through the dust and heat of the noonday; Nay, she should ride like a queen, not plod along like a peasant. Somewhat alarmed at first, but reassured by the others, Placing her hand on the cushion, her foot in the hand of her husband, Gayly, with joyous laugh, Priscilla mounted her ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... where shall rest be found?" would have received answer to his query here also. The quiet is astonishing: there are no farm sounds even; and, though the hours pass so pleasantly that we "take no note of time", we can tell when Saturday comes, for then numbers of log-laden ox-carts plod slowly into the village from ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase
... sense of dulness. It was indeed rather the reverse. The whole fabric of life was richer, more impassioned, more desirable than he had ever supposed. In youth, emotion and feeling had seemed to him like oases in a desert, oases which one had to quit, when one crossed the threshold of life, to plod wearily among endless sands. But now he had found that the desert had a life, an emotion, a beauty of its own, and the oases of youthful fancy seemed to be tame and limited by comparison. Hugh still thought with a shudder ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... people who have known other coasts, and are in some sort citizens of the world. It is very different from the inland New England manner; as different as the gentle, slow speech of the shore from the clipped nasals of the hill-country. The lounging native walk is not the heavy plod taught by the furrow, but has the lurch and the sway of the deck ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... interested in the quieter and more lasting varieties of sport. He will joyfully chase the wild boar, when horses, dogs, and horns, with the admiration of his friends and servants, concur to keep his blood boiling; but he will not care to plod alone through the woods for a long afternoon on the chance of bringing home a brace of woodcock; nor can he mention fishing without a sneer. Being thus deprived of the chief resource by which Anglo-Saxons ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... shot bump grab fled ship blot lump drab sled whip spot pump slab sped slip plot jump stab then drip trot hump brag bent spit clog bulk cram best crib frog just clan hemp gift plod drug clad vest king stop shut ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... did not stun me at once, I might perhaps hint at the possibility that this was to be attributed almost as much to the narrowness of his reading on this subject as to the extent of mine. There are men here who are mere mathematical blocks; who plod on their eight hours a day to the honours of the Senate House; who leave the groves which witnessed the musings of Milton, of Bacon, and of Gray, without one liberal idea or elegant image, and carry ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... find it? The nearest town, where the only railway station then was, was eight miles off, and he was not likely to plod back thither again, and the village inn, five miles away, was ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... rest, and I can quite well push in the cart by myself," urged Nello many a morning; but Patrasche, who understood him aright, would no more have consented to stay at home than a veteran soldier to shirk when the charge was sounding; and every day he would rise and place himself in his shafts, and plod along over the snow through the fields that his four round feet had left their print upon ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... to have been his strange fate to flash all at once into notoriety, which lasted precisely two years, to fill the court and town during that time with continuous laughter, intermingled with inquiries who and what he was, and then for seventeen long years to plod on unknown and unregarded, still hearing his Hudibras quoted, and still preparing more of it, or matter similar, with no result. He died, in almost absolute destitution, in 1680, and was buried at a friend's expense, in the church-yard ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... the last few days, now forsook me altogether. But I was not alone. By some process which I was too weak to solve, my arms, legs, and stomach were transformed into so many traveling companions. Often for hours I would plod along conversing with these imaginary friends. Each had his peculiar wants which he expected me to supply. The stomach was importunate in his demand for a change of diet—complained incessantly of the roots I fed him, their present effect and more remote consequences. I would ...
— Thirty-Seven Days of Peril - from Scribner's Monthly Vol III Nov. 1871 • Truman Everts
... very slow progress. It was almost nowhere possible to trot, and we had to plod on, step by step. This made ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... stands for those little black blocks on the military map, has a boy's impatience in him; and a very wise man, if he wishes to keep an army in spirit, will avoid counter-marching as much as he can, for—I cannot tell why—nothing takes the heart out of a man like having to plod over again the very way he has just come. So, when we had come to a very small village in the waste and halted there, finding our guns and drivers already long arrived, we made an end of a dull and meaningless day—very difficult to tell of, because the story is merely a record of ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... to see a skillful horse plod through a stream, probing with his eyes the depth, and stretching his head before his feet, and at every step he whisks his tail to tell himself that he is right. In my agony of observation all these things I heeded, but only knew that I had done so when I thought long afterward. At the moment ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... ready-made disguises—unhook them, rather. He must know all the cant-phrases, the cant-references. There are very, very many of them, and belike it is hard to keep them all at one's finger-tips. But, at least, there is no difficulty in collecting them. Plod through the 'leaders' and 'notes' in half-a-dozen of the daily papers, and you will bag whole coveys ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... echoes of the Mantuan song? From Truth and Nature shall we widely stray, Where Virgil, not where Fancy, leads the way? Yes, thus the Muses sing of happy swains, Because the Muses never knew their pains: They boast their peasant's pipes; but peasants now Resign their pipes and plod behind the plough; And few, amid the rural tribe, have time To number syllables and play with rhyme; Save honest DUCK, what son of verse could share The poet's rapture and the peasant's care? Or ...
— The Village and The Newspaper • George Crabbe
... tin dinner service, while one man in each division stood guard. Special duties were assigned to the "extras," and Will's was to ride up and down the train delivering orders. This suited his fancy to a dot, for the oxen were snail-gaited, and to plod at their heels was dull work. Kipling tells us it is quite impossible to "hustle the East"; it were as easy, as Will discovered, to ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... Century,' for last November, "and by no means the minority, who, however wealthy in regard to facts, can never rise into the region of principles; and they are sometimes intolerant of those that can. They are formed to plod meritoriously on in the lower levels of thought; unpossessed of the pinions necessary to reach the heights, they cannot realize the mental act—the act of inspiration it might well be called—by which a man of genius, after long pondering ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... endurance. He made several Alpine tours, and once (in 1860) he accompanied me in an ascent of the Jungfrau with a couple of guides. He was fresh from London; we had passed a night in a comfortless cave; the day was hot, and his weight made a plod through deep snow necessarily fatiguing. We reached the summit with considerable difficulty. On the descent he slipped above a certain famous bergschrund; the fall of so ponderous a body jerked me out of the icy steps, and our combined weight ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... us anywhere. I won't press you further to voice your suspicion—right now. In the meantime, I'll plod along with my investigation on the ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... ale and a short rest were welcome as the heat of the day came on, making the old dog plod wearily on with his tongue out, so that Stephen began to consider whether he should indeed have to be his bearer—a serious matter, for the creature at full length measured nearly as much as he did. They met hardly any one, and they and ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... world will laugh when thou art gone And solemn brood of care plod on And each one as before will chase his ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... population of Somers and Camden towns, Islington, and Pentonville, are fast pouring into the city, or directing their steps towards Chancery-lane and the Inns of Court. Middle-aged men, whose salaries have by no means increased in the same proportion as their families, plod steadily along, apparently with no object in view but the counting-house; knowing by sight almost everybody they meet or overtake, for they have seen them every morning (Sunday excepted) during the last twenty years, but speaking to no one. If they do happen to overtake a personal ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... highly praise the conduct of the narrative. It is full of improbable combinations. Persons and scenes are brought into juxtaposition, in a manner to violate every principle of vraisemblance. The effect is so to blunt the interest of the story, that we can hardly plod on to the winding-up. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... an old man, too, who used to come up our street with a little coal cart; he wore a coal-heaver's hat, and looked rough and black. He and his old horse used to plod together along the street, like two good partners who understood each other; the horse would stop of his own accord at the doors where they took coal of him; he used to keep one ear bent toward his master. The old man's cry could be heard ...
— Black Beauty • Anna Sewell
... ask a favor of Martin Howe if she had to plod every step of the three scorching miles; and if he were brute enough to let her toil along in the heat—to walk while he rode—well, that was all she ever wanted to know about him. Her heart beat tumultuously as she heard the wheels ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... as will appear. First of all, there must be good sleighing; and second, a fine night for Christmas eve. Ours are not the carollings of your poor shivering little East Angles or South Mercians, where they have to plod round afoot in countries which do not know what a ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... meane while I must struggle with those bookes which I vnderstand and content myselfe to plod upon them, in hope that God (who knoweth the sincerenesse of my desire) will be pleased to open my vnderstanding, so as I may reape that profit of my reading, which I trauell for. Yet is there a gentleman in this company, whom I have had often a purpose to intreate, that as his liesure might ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... he was to-night? It hurt—yes, it hurt horribly, sometimes, this stone-cold silence, this walking always in shadowed paths without a ray of light, without the certainty of arriving anywhere, though he plod onward for a lifetime—and the old feeling of savage resentment, the old sense of self-pity—the surest thing on God's earth to blaze a trail for the oncoming of the worst that is in a man—bit at the soul of him and touched him on ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... could never go from one place to another in a slow, sober walk. He always moved by leaps, as if he felt too gay to plod along like Daddy Longlegs, for instance. Chirpy himself often remarked that he hadn't time to move slowly. And almost before he had finished speaking, as likely as not he would jump into the air and alight some distance away. It was all done so quickly that a person could ...
— The Tale of Chirpy Cricket • Arthur Scott Bailey
... every day; It warms the bones and breathes upon the heart; But you I see out-plod a little way, Bitten with cold; your cheeks and fingers smart. Would you were here, we might in temples lie, And look from azure into azure sky, And paradise achieve, slipping ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... muse, unraimented with rhyme, Her hair unfilleted, her feet unshod, Naked and not ashamed demands of God No covering for her beauty's youth or prime. Clad but with thought, as space is clad with time, Or both with worlds where man and angels plod, She runs in joy, magnificently odd, Ruggedly wreathed with flowers of every clime. And you to whom her breath is sweeter far Than choicest attar of the martyred rose More deeply feel mortality's unrest Than poets born beneath a happier star, Because the pathos ...
— Walt Whitman Yesterday and Today • Henry Eduard Legler
... much depends on our attitude regarding our calling. We can plod like an ox, or like Markham's semi-brute man with the hoe, and make that the badge of servitude to toil, or we can make it a wand in a magician's hand to call forth radiant forms of beauty from the somber earth to smile upon ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... escorted the unlucky adventurer with that which was not his own back to the spot whence he had started. His transgression was now to be traced from the moment—day or night, or sunrise or sunset; what mattered the moment?—when the thought passed through his brain, "Why should I plod on ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... there are some, who 'twixt me and the youth Have heard this discourse, whose sole aim is the truth, Will see and acknowledge, as homeward they plod, Each thing is arrang'd ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... the record may serve me. How it had snowed all day! how it did snow this afternoon when I started out, wrapped in my waterproof, accoutred to encounter the storm, and rejoicing in the absence of long skirts and hooped petticoats! With my India-rubber boots I felt I could plod through any snow-drift, and I gained a pervading sense of exhilaration from the beating of the storm in my face. I chose a certain street I had come to know, which ran straight through the town and on into a more thinly-settled suburb. It ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... of man's fugitive castaway soul upon a doomed and derelict planet. The minds of all men plod the same rough roads of sense; and in spite of much knavery, all win at times "an ampler ether, a diviner air." The great poets, our masters, speak out of that clean freshness of perception. We ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... toes and fingers, and arms full of leafy treasures, we plod our way back to the chaise. A pleasant song is in my ears from this old wood lot—it speaks of green and cheerful patience in life's hard weather. Not a scowling, sullen endurance, not a despairing, hand-dropping ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... questions. He wished Wittemore would come back and say his mother was better! It was Wittemore that had started all this queer side-track of philanthropy; that had sent him off to make toast for old women and manage funerals for strange young girls. If Wittemore would get back to his classes and plod off to his slums every day, with his long horse-like face and his scared little apologetic smile, why, perhaps his own mind would assume its normal bent and let him get at his work. And with that he sat down and wrote a letter to Wittemore, brief, sympathetic, inquiring, ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... and crestfallen, Donald returned to Kildun and urged the Prince to instant flight. But not even the fear of immediate capture could induce the three wearied men to set out again in the wet and darkness to plod over rocks and morasses with no certain goal. So Donald had to control his fears and impatience ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... the bottom of the wine there is a bitter dreg called satiety; but Virtue does not much heed that; like the woman she is, she only notes that Sin drives a pair of ponies in the sunshine, while she herself is often left to plod wearily through the everlasting falling rain. So she dubs us "cynics" and leaves us—who can wonder if we won't follow her through the rain? Sin smiles so merrily if she makes us pay toll at the end; whereas Virtue—ah me, ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... to my plan.—To make the dull ones plod well, Books for the use of schools, give Mr. Rodwell; And works on painting should you ever lack, You need but brush to either Grey ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 580, Supplemental Number • Various
... had a great fortune, Lotta, don't you think you would be very much disposed to leave me to plod on at my desk in Great Russell-street? Possessed of wealth, you would begin to languish for position; and you would allow Mr. Sheldon to bring you some suitor who could give you a name and a rank in society worthy of an angelic creature with ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... as I can find out he never killed anything himself. He was concerned with the romance of the thought, with alliteration, and the singular charm of the truth—sunset and the end of the day, the hunter's plod down the hill to the cottage, to the home where wife and children awaited him. Indeed it is a beautiful truth, and not altogether in the past, for there ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... spoken since leaving the ford, O'Connor saving breath for the work in hand. Once or twice he had turned to the Midget who toiled manfully on at his side and asked him if he felt tired. Satisfied with the boy's ready answer that he was "all right," he would plod on again. ...
— A Voyage with Captain Dynamite • Charles Edward Rich
... deepens, and the gray Folds closer earth and sky; The world seems shrouded far away; Its noises sleep, and I, As secret as yon buried stream, Plod ...
— Lyrics of Earth • Archibald Lampman
... into tears, Then calmed again: "My reindeer fleet, I gave them up: on foot, my dears, I now must plod through ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow, Vol. IV (of IV) • Harrison S. Morris
... unaddicted to drinking, with a fair amount of determined plod could win them. The alleged 'difficulties' in the way are perfectly childish. They scarcely deserve to be called the pothooks and hangers of an education. I always got my work done in two or three hours—the rest of my time at college was pure leisure,—which I ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... Friend he felt the strength of the new rich, and knew they had begun to transform the aristocracy, instead of the aristocracy transforming them. He knew that Veneering had carried off Twemlow in triumph. He very nearly knew what we all know to-day: that, so far from it being possible to plod along the progressive road with more votes and more Free Trade, England must either sharply become very much more democratic or as rapidly become ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... For you,' he continued, 'you are as charming as ever—you will win your way only the better in the world for this little experience. And as for me—I have been in Elysium for three months; and that is more than a host of your excellent prudent men can boast of, who plod on day after day only that they may continue plodding to the end of their lives. Adieu! my adorable—my angel that will now vanish from my sight!' And here, in spite of my struggles, he embraced me with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... a desperate business, the subsequent climb was heartbreaking. He needed a long rest before he was able to plod on, now conceiving the sun in the guise of a personal enemy. The sweat that streamed from his face was brine upon his lips. For hours it was thus with Duchemin, and in all that time he met never a soul. ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... would cherish the trust which your fathers left, Ye must strive—ye must work—without ease. Strong have your good sires battled, oft have your fathers bled, If ye would hold up the flag which they've never let sag, Ye must plod—ye must creep where they've led. The shimmering icebergs call you; the plunging screw-drums scream, By shallowing shoals they haul you, to the beat of the walking beam. The twisting petrels chatter, as ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston
... humble feet did plod, My bosom beating with the glow of song; And high-born fancy walk'd with me along, Treading the earth Imperial ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 343, November 29, 1828 • Various
... brightness— Thy rainbows, thy pearls, thy clear emerald green; On rapids still toss'd into foam of pure whiteness; On falls the most glorious that Earth has e'er seen! Strength acquiring, in admiring All as the matchless work of God; Can, with pleasure, leave such treasure, And my journey onward plod. ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... continued with a weary monotony to plod, down to the very last line, and then da capo, and so on, in my uncomfortable half-sleep, for how long, I can't conjecture. I found myself at last, however, muttering, 'dead as a door-nail, so there ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 1 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... to start again early in the morning. They had by this time grown quite accustomed to the plod, plodding of the train; it seemed almost one of the normal and necessary conditions of life. They went down by Genoa, Spezia, Pisa, Sienna, and Rome, ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... as he talked, in straight lines; but before he turned the corner he glanced up and down the empty sidewalk in a quick, furtive fashion, and after he had swung into the side street a trifle of the steam seemed gone from his stiff-spined, hard-heeled gait. It ceased to be a strut; it became a plod. ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... country! city of the soul! The orphans of the heart must turn to thee, Lone mother of dead empires! and control In their shut breasts, their petty misery. What are our woes and sufferance?—Come and see The cypress, hear the owl, and plod your way O'er steps of broken thrones and temples, Ye! Whose agonies are evils of a day:— A world is at our feet ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... highway was the Ohio River; for to drift down stream in a scow was easier and quicker, and no more dangerous, than to plod through thick mountain forests. Moreover, it was much easier for the settler who went by water to carry with him his household goods and implements of husbandry; and even such cumbrous articles as wagons, or, if he was rich and ambitious, the lumber wherewith to build a frame house. ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... quick decision. You like to reason things out; you want to know why before you go ahead. Your success lies in lines which require slow, thoughtful, careful reasoning, mature deliberation, and an ability to plod diligently through masses ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... Plod in thy cave, gray anchorite; Be wiser than thy peers; Augment the range of human power, And trust to coming years. They may call thee wizard, and monk accursed, And load thee with dispraise; Thou wert born five hundred years too soon For the comfort of thy days; ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... there had been a change of the olden customs, and instead of the long chapter, through which Uncle Ephraim used to plod so wearily, there was now read the Evening Psalms, Aunt Betsy herself joining in the reading, which she mentally classed with the "quirks," but confessed to herself that it "was most ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... his ample front sublime uprears; Plac'd on his chair of state, he seems a God, While Sophs and Freshmen, tremble at his nod. Whilst all around sit wrapt in speechless gloom, His voice in thunder shakes the sounding dome; Denouncing dire reproach, to luckless fools, Unskill'd to plod in mathematic rules. ...
— Fugitive Pieces • George Gordon Noel Byron
... As your horses plod up and up the almost perpendicular trail that leads out of the Nicola Valley to the summit, a paradise of beauty outspreads at your feet; the color is indescribable in words, the atmosphere thrills you. Youth and the pulse of rioting ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson
... hotter as we plod along. Presently we come up with three mounted Arabs, riding leisurely. Salutations are exchanged with gravity. Then the Arabs whisper something to each other and spur away at a great pace ahead of us—laughing. Why ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... Plod, plod, plod away, Step by step in mouldering moss; Thick branches bar the day Over languid streams that cross Softly, slowly, with a sound Like a smothered weeping, In their aimless creeping ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... of soft ease we may have harboured in Kashmir, and reminds us that we have to prepare ourselves to face beauties of a far sterner kind. So we insensibly alter our whole attitude of mind, and as we plod our way through the mountains we summon up from within ourselves all the austerer stuff ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... began again to plod up the treadmill it had labored on for so many black hours. He set himself to get it clear in his own mind, forcing those fierce, burning thoughts of his into words, as if he had been speaking aloud. "Now, now here I am. What must I do? What ought I to ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... man and horse, were you but once there, after plodding through the desolations. But from that Sazawa by the Luschnitz on to Budweis, mounting and falling in such fashion, there must be ninety miles or thereby. Plod along; and keep a sharp eye on the whirling clouds of Pandours, for those too have got across upon us,—added to the other ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... COLLEGES.—Clairvoyance and spiritual phenomena have been in progress all over the world from periods beyond historic record, but colleges have not yet learned of their existence. They are now becoming familiar to millions, from the emperor to the beggar, and still the colleges plod on in sanctified ignorance where the priest rules, or in insolent dogmatism where the medical professor rules. Is there anything in the way of demonstration that can overcome this pachydermic stupidity?—doubtful! Clairvoyants have described diseases, described ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... is magnificent! His long lash sends out a volley of rifle reports, down, up, ahead, back; his cracked voice roars out an unending stream of apparent gibberish. Back and forth along the line of the team he skips nimbly, the sweat streaming from his face. And the oxen plod along, unhasting, unexcited, their eyes dreamy, chewing the cud of yesterday's philosophic reflections. The situation conveys the general impression of a peevish little stream breaking against great calm cliffs. ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... the 2nd Battalion of the Rifle Brigade arrived on the 2nd of August at Dakhala, during a blustering dust-storm. For all that, black and travel-stained, they were glad to detrain, and to plod through the sand, and breast the laden atmosphere, in order to get into camp hard by the Atbara. The following day the remainder of the battalion marched in under somewhat pleasanter conditions. Everybody turned ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... the slender stem of a wild sunflower, warbles a sweet assurance of this as I pass near by. Breaking off the clear crystal song, he turns his wee head from side to side eyeing me wisely as slowly I plod with moccasined feet. Then again he yields himself to his song of joy. Flit, flit hither and yon, he fills the summer sky with his swift, sweet melody. And truly does it seem his vigorous freedom lies more in his little spirit than in ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... Hold, sirrah, bear you these letters tightly; Sail like my pinnace to these golden shores. Rogues, hence, avaunt! vanish like hailstones, go; 75 Trudge, plod away o' the hoof; seek shelter, pack! Falstaff will learn the humour of the age, French thrift, you rogues; ...
— The Merry Wives of Windsor - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... students the piano is only a barrier—a wall between them and music. Their thoughts never seem to penetrate farther than the keys. They plod along for years apparently striving to make piano-playing machines of themselves, and in the end result in ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... impracticable for the Serbs to concentrate and to embark from those few wooden huts which are called, in Italian, San Giovanni di Medua. Between the bare cliffs and the sea the miserable men and boys and women were compelled to plod towards the south. One hundred and fifty thousand survivors were eventually carried by ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... the wind at sundown; I can row in with Johnny," said I; and Mrs. Todd nodded reassuringly and kept to her steady plod, not quickening her gait even when we saw William come round the corner of the house as if to look for us, and ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... are given to hospitality," he said; "we're always looking for the angel we are going to entertain unawares. Come along home with us, Lewis." And Lewis would plod up the hill and take his turn at the tin washbasin, and then file down the men's side of the stairs to the dining-room, where he and the three old brothers sat at one table, and Athalia and the eight sisters sat at the other table. After supper he had the chance to see ...
— The Way to Peace • Margaret Deland
... you the while (As you are cruell) will sit by and smile, To make me write to these, while Passers by, Sleightly looke in your louely face, where I See Beauties heauen, whilst silly blockheads, they Like laden Asses, plod vpon their way, 80 And wonder not, as you should point a Clowne Vp to the Guards, or Ariadnes Crowne; Of Constellations, and his dulnesse tell. Hee'd thinke your words were certainly a Spell; Or him some piece from Creet, or Marcus ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... present happy-go-lucky provision for the diplomatic service. As already stated, on arriving in Berlin, I had great difficulty in obtaining any fitting quarters, but at last secured a large and suitable apartment in an excellent part of the city, its only disadvantage being that my guests had to plod up seventy-five steps in order to reach it. Having been obliged to make large outlays for suitable fittings, extensive repairs, and furniture throughout, I found that more than the entire salary of my first year had been thus sunk; but ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... here all right. Rather odd place for us to meet, isn't it? But, you see, you've had the advantage all these years; you knew whom you were running away from, while I was compelled to plod along in the dark. But I 've caught up just the same, if it has ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... calls to me from the road And slows his horse to a meaning walk, I don't stand still and look around On all the hills I haven't hoed, And shout from where I am, What is it? No, not as there is a time to talk. I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground, Blade-end up and five feet tall, And plod: I go up to the stone wall ...
— Mountain Interval • Robert Frost
... but how far down? Was the deep canyon he had tried to follow the right one? Somewhere he had lost the "squaw ax," and dry wood was inaccessible under snow. If it were not for Sprudell, he knew that he could still plod on. ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... morning, and now the sun was not less bright or the colours less fair, but the heart had gone out of the spectator. At first I managed to get some pace out of myself, partly from fear and partly from anger. But I soon found that my body had been tried too far. I could plod along, but to save my life I could not have hurried. Any healthy savage could have caught ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... journey, rugged and uneven, Through prickly moors or dusty ways must wind; But hearing thee, or others of thy kind, As full of gladness and as free of heaven, I, with my fate contented, will plod on, 30 And hope for higher raptures, when life's ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... covenant comes out, When every man gathers his fee; I'le take my blew blade all in my hand, And plod to the green ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... cornfields, to crouch among boulders, and occasionally to fall prone to earth when shells came screaming and bursting along their line of route. Afterwards they would rise again, still holding their life in their hands, and plod on in the expectation that every step would be their last. For eight long miles this exciting form of torture was experienced, numbers of the poor fellows dropping all along the road from wounds, exhaustion, and from the effects of the now fiercely blazing sun. Terrible ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... have been among them, and known them as friends, know that they hold in their ranks some of the most generous-hearted, unselfish, big-souled women to exist in England to-day; and that it is just because of that they are able to plod cheerfully on, and laugh that indulgent, pitying little laugh, when an outraged man swells with virtuous indignation, and waxes eloquent upon their ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... with thy broad shoulders, John Alden, thou wilt do well to make them of use. There is Mistress Allerton struggling with a hamper beyond her strength, and there are bales of clothes that must not be wet. Load thyself, good mule, and plod shoreward." ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... known what I have seen and known! Ah, yes, doubtless it is far better I should die; but the knowledge of the things that I have seen I feel should not perish with me. For hope's sake, men should not miss the glimpse of the higher, sun-bathed reaches of the upward path they plod. So thinking, I have written out some account of my wonderful experience, though briefer far, by reason of my weakness, than fits the greatness of the matter. The captain seems an honest, well-meaning man, and to him I shall confide the narrative, charging him, on ...
— To Whom This May Come - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... about a dozen of them," he said thickly. And, holding the Winchester ready, he commenced once more to plod on through the stinging sheets of wind-driven ice particles. More than once he had great difficulty in not losing that crimson trail, for here and there the restless, white crystals ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... Political Economy, gives us an account of this condition of things, as prevailing among the peasants in certain districts of Germany. "They labour early and late," he says, quoting from a German eulogist. "They plod on from day to day and from year to year, the most untirable of human animals." The German writer admires them as men who are their own masters. Mill holds them up as a shining and instructive example of the magic ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... Hold, sirrah; bear you these letters tightly; Sail like my pinnace to these golden shores. Rogues, hence, avaunt! vanish like hailstones, go; Trudge, plod away o' hoof; seek shelter, pack! Falstaff will learn the humour of this age; French thrift, you rogues; ...
— The Merry Wives of Windsor • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... reader and had the rare faculty of being able to seize on what he needed to use. He often read three volumes a day. But I don't advise you to copy him. I want you to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest. He could absorb, but, we'll take it for granted that you must plod on steadily, step by step. He read through Johnson's Dictionary to ...
— Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin
... evening his mind was wide awake. Nor could he fix it upon business. It would interest itself only in the hurrying throngs of foot passengers and the ideas they suggested: Here am I—so ran his thoughts—here am I, tucked away comfortably while all those poor creatures have to plod along in the storm. I could afford to be sick. They can't. And what have I done to deserve this good fortune? Nothing. Worse than nothing. If I had made my career along the lines of what is honest and ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... courtesies—all the accumulated homage disused for courts and kings and craving exercise. The revolt of white women against this preordained destiny has in these latter days reached splendid proportions, but it is the revolt of an aristocracy of brains and ability,—the middle class and rank and file still plod on in the appointed path, paid by the homage, the almost mocking ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... day the doubly bereaved man started on his lonely journey back to the Dakota claim, back to an empty house, with a gnawing pain in his heart and a constriction like an iron band about his throat; back to his broad fields to plod ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... being is fitted for some sphere of usefulness—some industry by which he can benefit mankind and support himself in comfort. Just what we are fitted for must, almost invariably, be decided by ourselves; and the sooner the better, else we may plod among the thousands whose lives are miserable failures for the reason that "they have ...
— Piano Tuning - A Simple and Accurate Method for Amateurs • J. Cree Fischer
... amply repay one to plod, step by step, over these thousands of pages, if only to trace the hand of God touching the springs of human action all over the world in ways of His own, and at times of great need, and adjusting the amount and the exact day and hour of the supply, to the existing want. ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... believed that "knowledge is power," which is true in a certain sense, but not in the sense or to the extent that it seemed true to Davie. His grandfather was afraid of the boy's eager craving, and of what might come of it, and would far rather have seen him content, as his father had been, to plod through the winter, busy with the occupations which the season brought, than so eager to get away to Mr Burnet and his books. The grandfather had his sorrowful reasons for wishing to keep the lad in the quiet and safe ...
— David Fleming's Forgiveness • Margaret Murray Robertson
... and laughing; while now and then a pair of invisible experts would pass, playing mandolin and guitar as if handle-bars were of no account in the world—their music would come swiftly, and then too swiftly die away. Surreys rumbled lightly by, with the plod-plod of honest old horses, and frequently there was the glitter of whizzing spokes from a runabout or a sporting buggy, and the sharp, decisive hoof-beats of a trotter. Then, like a cowboy shooting up a peaceful camp, a frantic devil would hurtle out of the distance, bellowing, exhaust ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... to meet with any difficult points, I fret not my selfe about them, but after I have given them a charge or two, I leave them as I found them. Should I earnestly plod upon them, I should loose both time and my selfe, for I have a skipping wit. What I see not at the first view, I shall lesse see it if I opinionate my selfe upon it. I doe nothing without blithnesse; and an over obstinate continuation and plodding contention doth dazle, ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... form of temptation by any means. But what has been may be again, and it is none the easier to resist because it is unusual. When a young girl, with hot impatience, feels she is not advancing as rapidly as she should, the wealthy "patron of Art" declares it is folly for her to plod along so slowly, that he will free her from all trammels, he will provide play, wardrobe, company, and show the world that she is already an artist. To her trembling objection that she could only accept such tremendous aid from one of ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... the party were to go to Count von Rappoltstein in the village of Rappolts, and this time Ulrich was not to plod along on foot, or he in a close baggage-wagon; no, he was to be allowed to ride a spirited horse. The escort would not consist of hired servants, but of picked men, and the count was going to join the train ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... traverse the country; peragrate^; circumambulate, perambulate; nomadize^, wander, ramble, stroll, saunter, hover, go one's rounds, straggle; gad, gad about; expatiate. walk, march, step, tread, pace, plod, wend, go by shank's mare; promenade; trudge, tramp; stalk, stride, straddle, strut, foot it, hoof it, stump, bundle, bowl along, toddle; paddle; tread a path. take horse, ride, drive, trot, amble, canter, prance, fisk^, frisk, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... work and wait, whether the world applaud or hiss. It wants a Bancroft, who can spend twenty-six years on the "History of the United States;" a Noah Webster, who can devote thirty-six years to a dictionary; a Gibbon, who can plod for twenty years on the "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire;" a Mirabeau, who can struggle on for forty years before he has a chance to show his vast reserve, destined to shake an empire; a Farragut, a ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... and down the earth men pant and plod, March, laughing at the showers and days unsteady, And whispering secret orders to the sod, For Spring ...
— Enamels and Cameos and other Poems • Theophile Gautier
... hard. Man wanted to tear down, not build up. Cynical. Oh, I do hope I'm not a sentimentalist. But I can't see any use in this high-art stuff that doesn't encourage us day-laborers to plod on." ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... meet Crews and Jordan and Saxon. They're very dissimilar, but they've got something like the unifying motive of a monastery, and they're willing to serve and to plod and to be patient. I fight with Saxon because he's a pacifist, but like all pacifists he's a very pugnacious person, and he can get frightfully angry, but it's pitiful to see him when he's been angry, ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... be. But, my dear Stephen, it is only those who half know a thing that write about it. Those who know it thoroughly don't take the trouble. All I know about women, or men either, is a mass of generalities. I plod along, and occasionally lift my eyes and skim the weltering surface of mankind lying between me and the horizon, as a ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... in the woods of a night without being frozen to death, thousands of the convicts try to escape from the gold and salt mines. These poor folk prefer to run the risk of capture and the brutal punishment it involves, rather than remain longer in endless misery. Feeding on mushrooms and berries they plod their weary way back, amid perils of every kind, to their native homes, hundreds—it may be thousands—of miles distant. They avoid towns and highways, of course, but they freely enter the villages. The Siberian peasants, in silent pathetic fashion, show their ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... reach a world where we shall not have to plod through so much doubt and misgiving, and where our real feelings will ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... written in the pouring rain, in a shaking stagecoach, or by the light of a lantern. They were also promptly handed in at the office, despite the fact that the stages sometimes broke down and left their passengers to plod on foot through the miry roads leading into London. These reports and newspaper articles soon attracted attention; and Dickens received an offer for a series of humorous sketches, which grew into the famous Pickwick Papers, ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... in the world and its bigness and splendor: That most of the hearts beating round us are tender; That days are but footsteps and years are but miles That lead us to beauty and singing and smiles: That roses that blossom and toilers that plod Are filled with the glorious ...
— A Heap o' Livin' • Edgar A. Guest
... said, sir. Science knows no party lines. Your chosen subject rises above the valley of partisanry where we old wheel-horses plod—stinging each other in the dust, as the poet finely says. Mr. West has told me of ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison |
