For it is given to no man to be an idle cumberer of the ground, but to dig, and sow, and plant, and reap the fruits of his labor for the garner.

She remembered that Joan Laval was, as Adolphus hinted, weakly, nervous, 'frightened at her own shadow,'a woman who had never, for any single day of her life, lived with a lofty purpose,a cumberer of the ground, who could only cast a shadow.

I have, until I have longed for an Elijah and for fire, that the grown-up cumberers of the ground, who are the ones really in the way, might be burned up, to make room for the children.

Tom sympathised with him deeply, of course; and did not tell him, as he might have done, that he thought the sooner such cumberers of the ground were cleared off, whether by an encumbered estates' act, such as we may see yet in England, or by their own suicidal folly, the better it would be for the universe in general, and perhaps for themselves in particular.

I find myself a cumberer of the ground, where I fancied that I was going forth like a very Michaelfool that I was!leader of the armies of heaven.

After having been admired and valued as if its leaves were all emeralds and its buds apples of gold, it was spurned and ridiculed and everywhere cut down as a cumberer of the ground.

Useless and vain, a cumberer here, Have I been idling from year to year.

And since the polished white man came, He's loved and honored me the same; Though all the neighboring trees around Were slain, as cumberers of the ground, Yet here I tower in grandeur still, The pride and glory of the hill.

Like barren fig-trees we shall be useless cumberers of the ground.

Both have a supreme contempt for students, regarding them as effeminate cumberers of the ground.

He belonged to the cumberers of the earth.

Many of the southern crackers or poor whites spring from this class, which also in the backwoods gave birth to generations of violent and hardened criminals, and to an even greater number of shiftless, lazy, cowardly cumberers of the earth's surface.

With every chance to rise, these people remained mere squalid cumberers of the earth's surface, a rank, up-country growth, containing within itself the seeds of vicious, idle pauperism, and semi-criminality.

A fine wreck of a man this useless cumberer of the earth.

Before he went, however, he had opened his heart to his daughter Tamar, saying, "I now take leave, dear child, of the life of a gentleman; henceforward I must content myself with the corner of a kitchen ingle; and this, truly, is a berth," he added, "too good for a cumberer of the ground, such as I am."