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Baleful   Listen
adjective
Baleful  adj.  
1.
Full of deadly or pernicious influence; destructive. "Baleful enemies." "Four infernal rivers that disgorge Into the burning lake their baleful streams."
2.
Full of grief or sorrow; woeful; sad. (Archaic)






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Baleful" Quotes from Famous Books



... strong and baleful, To make it what it was before! There it skips with pail on pailful— Would thou wert a broom once more! Still new streams he scatters, Round and ever round me— Oh, a hundred waters Rushing in have bound me! ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various

... a Phryne. It would turn most men's heads to see her in a tight-fitting riding-habit that shows the outline of her figure as beautiful as that of a statue. In the boat, reading Dante, she looked like a Sybil, and one could understand a Nero's sacrilegious passion. Hers is an almost baleful beauty. Only the joining eyebrows make her appear a woman of our times, and this makes her all the more irritating. She has a certain habit of pushing back her hair by putting both hands at the back of ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... for the pretty notice of Moss in the last passage (6), we should be inclined to say that Shakespeare had as little regard for "idle Moss" as for the "baleful Mistletoe." In his day Moss included all the low-growing and apparently flowerless carpet plants which are now divided into the many families of Mosses, Lichens, Club Mosses, Hepaticae, Jungermanniae, &c., &c. And these plants, though holding no rank in the eyes of a florist, are yet deeply ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe

... shock. Snap Naab swayed to the door, and stepped down, all the time with his face over his shoulder, his baleful glance on Hare; then the blue haze ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey

... notion that Jalapa was the ancient Paradise, the argument is, that Paradise must have been in the tropics, in a region elevated far above the baleful heat and malaria of the low lands, in a climate where plants could grow to the utmost perfection. And there is no such place in the world except Jalapa. Here, too, when the daily shower, which is requisite to bring all vegetable ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson

... narcotics, nicotine, morphine, opium, alcohol, etc., and are frequently used as antidotes for these poisons. Binz found that dogs that have been stupified with alcohol could be awakened with coffee. It may thus be prescribed for hard drinkers to counteract the baleful excitability produced by alcohol; in fact, many topers taper off after a long debauch with coffee containing small amounts of alcoholic beverages. Considering its ability to counteract the slow intoxication of tobacco, ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers

... public-spirited landlord. They are the days when the spread of education had not even yet begun (for weal or for woe) its levelling work; days of cruel monopolies and inane prohibitions, and ferocious penal laws, inept in the working, baleful in the result; days of keel-hauling and flogging; when the "free-trader" still swung, tarred and in chains, on conspicuous points of the coast—even as the highwayman rattled at the cross-road—for the encouragement ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle

... on each side, helped Ada into the cab. Her feet scraped helplessly over the flagged pavement her head lolled on her shoulder, and the baleful white gleam of the huge electric lamps fell like limelight on her face contracted in an ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone

... weary of dark intrigues and impenetrable secrets we may turn to lighter reading. Yet it is significant of the taste of our ancestors that we cannot venture far without encountering a spectre of some sort, or a villain with the baleful eye, disguised, it may be, as a Spanish gipsy, a German necromancer or a Russian count. Many of the stories are Gothic novels, reduced in size, but with room ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead

... others, respectable for their rank and abilities, and venerable for their age and character, constituted the assembly; they decently, unanimously and firmly adhered to their former resolution, that the baleful commodity which was to rivet and establish the duty should never be landed; to prevent the mischief they repeated the desires of the Committee of the Towns, that the owner of the ship should apply for a clearance; it appeared that Mr. Rotch had been managed and was still under the influence ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 1, Issue 4 - April, 1884 • Various

... a fire broke out, on the twentieth of March, 1760, at the Brazen-Head, in Cornhill, and consumed nearly four hundred buildings. Similar disasters have always been epochs in the chronology of Boston. That of 1711 had hitherto been termed the Great Fire, but now resigned its baleful dignity to one which has ever since retained it. Did we desire to move the reader's sympathies on this subject, we would not be grandiloquent about the sea of billowy flame, the glowing and crumbling ...
— Old News - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... ran in the direction indicated, keeping his eyes on the ground. Suddenly he paused. Something just beyond the light was growing into a series of graceful loops. A long neck slowly lifted itself and two baleful eyes fixed upon Roldan. He raised his pistol, and the rattler was beheaded as neatly as if it were stuffed and dismembered with a pen knife. It shot out to full length, and the clever marksman took it by its horny tail and ...
— The Valiant Runaways • Gertrude Atherton

... which, one fancies, may be exchanged by opposing generals under a flag of truce, we would be rescued from her, removed from the room, before her forbearance should be strained, by our presence, to the point of breaking. A baleful look would follow us as we withdrew, and we would retire with a better understanding of the flaming spirit which, through that long, bloody conflict against overwhelming odds in wealth, supplies, and men, sustained the South, and ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street

... resoundingly clamorous upon the one side and the other when a duel is in progress, gave a sinister aspect to the thing. The papers had been gagged and blindfolded for the occasion. This in itself was of baleful significance. It was not a duel which they had been bribed to ignore. ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic

... no answer, but he looks at me with eyes that are positively baleful, and in the instant I read his mute but mulish resolve that Utopia ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells

... in there," he told the mate. "Let that nigger hold the wedge." There was rancor in his voice—baleful hostility shone in his snapping eyes; no captain tolerates disobedience at sea, and Mayo had disregarded all ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day

... by appearing in the same form they had in life, or by displacing the furniture and making a noise, as long as they have not terminated the expiation of their sins. The Catholic clergy, by supporting these fabulous doctrines and pious lies, lead their flock into the baleful habit of believing things the most ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson

... Courant—a white man like themselves! So deep was their disapproving astonishment that nobody could say anything. For a space they could only stare at him as though he, too, were suddenly dropping veils that had hidden unsuspected, baleful depths. ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner

... like a rainbow on the edge of the cloud, marked to our eyes the space where it was raging, and afforded, at the same time, the sure prognostic of fair weather. If we reject it, the vivid colors will grow pale,—it will be a baleful meteor portending tempest ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various

... masses and contorted shapes of the black clouds overhead, the surface of the ink-black sea around us, the distant proas, and the hull, spars, sails, and rigging of the barque, with the moving figures aloft and at the jib-boom end, and suffusing everything with so baleful and unearthly a light that only the slightest effort of the imagination was needed to fancy ourselves a phantom ship, manned by ghosts of the unquiet dead, floating upon the sooty flood of the Styx, with the adamantine foundations of the world arching ponderously ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood

... now laid aside too long,— The baleful burthen of this honest song. Though all her former functions are no more, She rules the circle which she served before. If mothers—none know why—before her quake; If daughters dread her for the mothers' sake; If early habits—those false links, which bind At times the loftiest ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... his corps, just after the two regiments of Cutler's brigade, which had been outflanked, fell back to the town by General Wadsworth's order. Upon witnessing this retreat, which was somewhat disorderly, General Howard hastened to send a special messenger to General Meade with the baleful intelligence that the First Corps had fled from the field at the first contact with the enemy, thus magnifying a forced retreat of two regiments, acting under orders, into the flight of an entire corps, two-thirds of which had not yet reached the field. It is ...
— Chancellorsville and Gettysburg - Campaigns of the Civil War - VI • Abner Doubleday

... of bashful hesitation, verging on nervous hilarity or hypocritical attention. For the last six months this question by the master had been invariably received each morning as a veiled pleasantry which might lead to baleful information or conceal some query out of the dreadful books before him. Yet this very element of danger had its fascinations. Johnny Filgee, a small boy, blushed violently, and, without getting up, began hurriedly in a high key, "Tige ith got," ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte

... the resources afforded by the city; and in this brief moment given to hope, he sent proposals of peace to the Emperor Alexander. A superior officer of the enemy's had just been found in the great hospital; he was charged with the delivery of this letter. It was by the baleful light of the flames of the bazaar that Napoleon finished it, and the Russian departed. He was to be the bearer of the news of this disaster to his sovereign, whose only answer was ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur

... Seen by gaslight the stones lacked brilliancy, and she thought the ring itself awkward and heavy. From the first she had regarded the gift superstitiously, as if the dull green stones, like four dull eyes, emitted a baleful influence. It was significant of her utter lack of religious associations that the cross itself suggested no counter charm. Had she been a Catholic, that shape alone would have made the ring a talisman, but her people were Congregationalists, ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins

... slight name of danger, Taunt, and revile, with bitter gibes, the wretched; The brave are ever to distress a friend. Tho' my dear country (spoil'd by wasteful war, Her harvests blazing, desolate her towns, And baleful ruin shew'd her haggard face) Call'd out on me to save her from her foes, And I obey'd, yet to your gallant prowess, And unmatch'd deeds, I admiration gave. But now my country knows the sweets of safety, Freed from her fears; ...
— The Prince of Parthia - A Tragedy • Thomas Godfrey

... dead, and looked towards the living, and the future which is in our hands. We are hypnotised, obsessed by the thought of those that we have lost, and the morbid temptation to bury our hearts in their graves, but we must tear ourselves away from the baleful vapours that rise, as in Rome, from The Way of the Tombs. March on! This is no time to halt. We have not yet earned the right to rest with them, for there are others who need us. There, like the wrecks of the Grand Army, you can see in the distance those who drag themselves along, searching ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain

... two-thirds of those taken in the United States were of the faith of Moses, Mendelssohn and Gimbel. But the Jews are perhaps not the worst. The Methodists, in all save a few big cities, exercise a control over the press that is far more rigid and baleful. In the Anti-Saloon League they have developed a machine for terrorizing office-holders and the newspapers that is remarkably effective, and they employed it during the long fight for Prohibition to throttle all opposition save ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan

... longed with every fiber of him to comfort the stricken woman, he did not dare intrude upon her in this time of her anguish, but quietly dropped back into his seat and sat watching with eyes now tender, now baleful, ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana

... with a light yet audible stroke of its feet and began fluting its tender, lonesome-sounding strain? If Father Beret heard it he gave no sign of recognition; very likely he was thinking about the cargo of liquor and how he could best counteract its baleful influence. He looked toward the "river house," as the inhabitants had named a large shanty, which stood on a bluff of the Wabash not far from where the road-bridge at present crosses, and saw men ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson

... approached the danger. Her alarm, to the mind of Ralph, was now sufficiently justified, as, looking through a crevice in the narrow apartment in which he stood, he beheld the malignant and hell-branded visage of Rivers, peering like a dim and baleful light in advance of his companion, in whose face a partial glimmer of the lamp revealed a something of reluctance, which rendered it doubtful how far Munro had in reality gone ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms

... Never within our lifetime has this country been so united on any great political issue. We ourselves have a real and deep admiration for German scholarship and science. We have many ties with Germany, ties of comradeship, of respect, and of affection. We grieve profoundly that, under the baleful influence of a military system and its lawless dreams of conquest, she whom we once honored now stands revealed as the common enemy of Europe and of all peoples which respect the law of nations. We must carry on the war on which we have entered. For ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various

... one morning very early. It was early, but still dark, for never, in these baleful Tropics, did the dawn precede the sunrise, and there was no slow, gradual greying and rosying creeping of daylight, preceding the dawn. It was early and dark, with a damp coolness in the air, and he reached down from his cot for his slippers, ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte

... judgment of the Bible in regard to sins, which the natural and universal conscience condemns, but which the inquirer means to persist in, if only he can get the Bible to testify against his conscience and in favor of his sins; so baleful, I say, is this practice, as to drive me to the conclusion that the Bible can not continue to be a blessing to mankind in spite of it. The practice, in its present wide and well-nigh universal extent, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... cruel that when it cannot kill animals by its baleful gaze, it turns upon herbs and plants, and fixing its gaze on them ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci

... long caravan's Dazed camels stop, and mute the Bedouins stare. This symbol of past power more than man's Presages doom. Kings look—and Kings despair: Their sceptres tremble in their jewelled hands And dark thrones totter in the baleful air! ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various

... permitted to get a head, they become incurable. As to young men, I am no way surprised by them, since, the passions being strong at that age, they are of course the more easily overpowered by their baleful influence. But after fifty, our lives should, in every thing, be governed by reason, which teaches us, that the consequences of gratifying our palate and our appetite are disease and death. Were this pleasure of the palate lasting, ...
— Discourses on a Sober and Temperate Life • Lewis Cornaro

... freed the land. An idol to the People be! A foe our Order frowns on thee! For in thy heart, superb and vain, A hell-worm laidlier than the slain, To discord which engenders death, Poisons each thought with baleful breath! That hell-worm is the stubborn Will— Oh! What were man and nations worth If each his own desire fulfil, And law be banish'd ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various

... descending and engaging in so unequal and useless a duel for the mere reward of a little added creature comfort. And so he sat perched in the tree while the rain fell steadily and the lion padded round and round beneath, casting a baleful eye ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... showing you a thousand characters.' As a preparation, the Face-Maker with both hands gouges himself, and turns his mouth inside out. He then becomes frightfully grave again, and says to the Proprietor, 'I am ready!' Proprietor stalks forth from baleful reverie, and announces 'The Young Conscript!' Face-Maker claps his wig on, hind side before, looks in the glass, and appears above it as a conscript so very imbecile, and squinting so extremely hard, that I should think the State would never ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens

... closed with a pathetic appeal to the Commissioner to use his influence to restore her dearest boy to her arms. It was not a bad letter from the artist's and the liar's standpoint, and she read it through with a glow of satisfaction, sealed it up with a baleful smile of triumph, and then sounded ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross

... virtue dawn'd upon his breast, Had done some glorious deed, to stamp his name High on the roll of ever-during fame; Snatch'd from Oppression's jaws some victim realm, Or fix'd in stable peace his country's wavering helm. But baleful Guilt usurp'd with fatal care A heart which Virtue had been proud to share; And turn'd to hateful dross the radiant ore, Whose lustre might have gilded Sweden's shore. As the red dog star, Autumn's fiery eye, Shines eminent o'er all the spangled sky, While thro' th' afflicted earth his ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker

... think of anything else. They sound in your dreams—those treadmill steps arousing echoes of bitterness and rebellion. You cannot escape from yourself. You cannot take a vacation. You may grow rich and travel far and spend desperately, but the baleful music will follow you to the end, the music of the work you did in hate. This is the tragedy of drudgery, not that you spend your time and strength at it, but that you ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various

... idolatry was not wholly indifferent to him. The paternal Whedell had hobbies. Matthew had studied them, like a skilful strategist, catered to them, and felt quite sure that he had that revered individual on his side. But, in the midst of these pleasant imaginings, there rose the dark and baleful ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton

... once, there was a cry—a wild struggle—a splash of the dark, seething waves—and Helen stood up again in her bright raiment alone on the margin of the pool; whilst ever-widening circles stretched hurriedly away and away, as though terror-stricken, from the baleful spot where Vera Nevill had ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron

... The baleful glitter of Leonard's eyes grew brighter still. He was as a serpent when he goes to strike. In this ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker

... who first Treason and falsehood taught! With grief and wrath accurst, Who set my brain distraught. Shame, woman baleful-eyed, Whose fatal love entombed In shadows of thy pride My April ere it bloomed. It was thy voice, thy smile, Thy poisoned glances bright, Which taught me to revile The semblance of delight. Thy grace of girlish years Murdered my ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus

... seize the slightest sign of feebleness in their attack; protesting her guiltlessness so loudly that she shouts truth down by brazen strength of lung; retiring at the close with taunts; blazing throughout with the intolerable lustre of some baleful planet. When she enters for the third time, it is to quarrel with her paramour. He has been stung to jealousy by a feigned love-letter. She knows that she has given him no cause; it is her game to lure him by fidelity to marriage. Therefore she resolves to make ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds

... the last exercise in the afternoon, and Minnie Smellie chose Shall we Gather at the River? It was a baleful choice and seemed to hold some secret and subtle association with the situation and general progress of events; or at any rate there was apparently some obscure reason for the energy and vim with which the scholars shouted the choral ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... deep, a cavern lies, devoid of light, All rough with rocks, and horrible to sight; Its dreadful mouth is fenc'd with sable floods, And the brown horrors of surrounding woods. From its black jaws such baleful vapours rise, Blot the bright day, and blast the golden skies, That not a bird can stretch her pinions there, Thro' the thick poisons, and incumber'd air, But struck by death, her flagging pinions cease; And hence Aornus was it call'd by Greece. ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber

... displaying a cunning ingenuity in most of their designs which it was by no means easy to forestall. Hence in the composition of their philtres and potions they infused the juices of the most deadly herbs, such as that of the nightshade or monkshood; and to add to the potency of these baleful draughts they considered it necessary to add as many as seven or nine of the most poisonous plants they could obtain, such, for instance, as those enumerated by one of the witches in Ben Jonson's "Masque of ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer

... please. It is much, however, that these tears, if not very burning, were really honest. Society, though not believing very deeply in the supernatural, was not cursed with an arid, parching, and hardened scepticism about the genuineness of good emotions in a man, and so long as people keep this baleful poison out of their hearts, ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... worse befall a man, think you? Can he be subjected to a more baleful influence than that which induces him to choose what is hurtful in place of what is helpful; which cajoles him to devote himself to the evil and to neglect the good; which forces him, will he nill he, to do what every man in his sober senses ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon

... no geese. We may say of the Fox too, that his morality and insight are of the same dimensions; different faces of the same internal unity of vulpine life! These things are worth stating; for the contrary of them acts with manifold very baleful perversion, in this time: what limitations, modifications they require, your own candour ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)

... is nothing the matter with you but the suffering occasioned by the horrible coercion which they are using with you. Your simple and generous soul does not comprehend it. You yield; you forgive those who injure you; you torment yourself, attributing your suffering to baleful, supernatural influences; you suffer in silence; you give your innocent neck to the executioner, you allow yourself to be slain, and the very knife which is plunged into your breast seems to you the thorn of ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos

... which had shed its influence over his first hours of life. The myriads of spectators who gazed at that natal emblem might well have thought that his life's star was now at its zenith. Few could have dared to think that it was to mount far higher into unknown depths of space, blazing as a baleful portent to kings and peoples; still less was there any Cassandra shriek of doom as to its final headlong fall into the wastes of ocean. All was joy and jubilation over a career that had even now ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose

... example; and they all ran off down the glade searching for Loob, whom they soon found and bearing their strange trophies on their spear-heads they went on. The monsters, clinging sullenly to their perches, rolled baleful eyes of emerald and rose and amethyst upon them as they went, but lifted never a wing to follow them. Ten minutes later the sun came out again. Then the monsters all sprang hurtling into the air, and darted hither and thither above the glade in shoals of iridescent radiance, seeking ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts

... constantly expanding disc flashed through the hundred miles of Earth's atmosphere, the ocean, as far as eye could see, became as light as day. Bathed in that baleful, white glare, Parkinson, bewildered, dazed, half-blinded, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various

... meantime the company of pursuers had reached the end of the hog's-back elevation which dominated this part of the down. They had decided on no particular plan of action; and, finding that the man of the baleful trade was no longer in their company, they seemed quite unable to form any such plan now. They descended in all directions down the hill, and straightway several of the party fell into the snare set by Nature for all misguided midnight ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various

... sat down. He put away his handkerchief, which had certainly earned a rest. Then he fastened a baleful stare upon his newly-discovered son. It was not the sort of look a proud and happy father-in-law-to-be ought to have directed at a prospective relative. It was not, as a matter of fact, the sort of look which anyone ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse

... dark, the subtle conspiracy which spreads its baleful roots throughout the land, and of which the Bleater's London Correspondent is the one sole subject, it is the purpose of the lowly Tattlesnivellian who undertakes this revelation, to tear the veil. Nor will he shrink from his self-imposed ...
— Contributions to All The Year Round • Charles Dickens

... school, the boy hung about the ticket-taker's booth, swept now to a wonderful cleanliness and adorned within with pictures cut from the illustrated papers. The small charcoal fire was Bobby's particular care. He fed and watched it, and having heard of the baleful effects of charcoal fumes, insisted on more fresh air than old Adelbert had ever ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... not afraid, ma'am, I promise you," he replied, laughing as he spoke; although he really did not feel one-half so merry as he made out; for he could see the baleful eyes of the watching McGee fastened upon them at that minute, as he stood not far away. "I came here on purpose to meet McGee. I carry a letter from my father, in which he asks the assistance of every ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne

... been nursing since a collision in the squash court some days previous. Involuntarily he uttered a cry of anguish, followed by a monosyllabic quotation from the original Anglo-Saxon. The girl turned upon him a baleful face, while the long-distance conversationalist on the dock reverted to his original possession and faded from sight in a series of ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... sometimes in greater danger than she ever dreamed. All did not act and feel thus toward her; more than one voice demanded her blood, and while she lay quietly dreaming of some loved one, there was many an angry discussion over her life. Deadly, baleful glances were given her, when in her musings she was unconscious of the notice of any one; and among the entire female portion there was not a squaw but what regarded her with feelings of jealousy and hatred. Had she remained a month, at the end of that time her life would no doubt have been sacrificed. ...
— The Ranger - or The Fugitives of the Border • Edward S. Ellis

... right to that other—the woman who was his wife. No, she must not keep it—the beautiful, tender thing. With steady hand, but blanched, quivering lips, she reached over and made a little grave among the dying embers, in which a sullen spark glowed like baleful eye. Quietly, with the feeling that she was burying all of youth and hope and joy her life would ever know, she kissed the card with dumb, clinging, passionate kisses, and then with a low, dry sob, covered it ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland

... and by consequence to a great extent those of individuals also, shall be carried back to a condition of things which fostered those contractions and expansions of the currency and those reckless abuses of credit from the baleful effects of which the country has so deeply suffered—a return that can promise in the end no better results than to reproduce the embarrassments the Government has experienced, and to remove from the shoulders of the present to those of fresh victims the bitter fruits of that spirit of ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... gained ground. Consequently, even the able advocacy of Fox on behalf of religious liberty failed to save Beaufoy's motion from a crushing defeat. Pitt spoke against the proposal and carried the House with him by 294 votes to 105. This vote illustrates the baleful influence exerted by the French Revolution on the cause of Reform ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose

... stars in their courses fought for us; and when, at last, these mightinesses turned upon us the cold and evil eye of their displeasure, how the heaped-up sea came pouring over here, trickling through there, and seeping under yonder, until our great dike toppled over in baleful tumult, "and all the world was in the sea"; how business, east, west, north, and south, went paralyzed with fear and distrust, and old concerns went out like strings of soap-bubbles, and shocks of pain and disease went round the world, and ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick

... Belloc lies this great difference. He writes, as we have said, candidly, in a partisan spirit, with the eagerness of a man who wishes to convince. In the University of Berlin the indoctrination of the student is pursued under the cloak of a baleful and gloomy pedantry, laughably miscalled "the scientific method." The propaganda of Frederick is not obvious and many ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell

... his afternoon's adventure borne fruit in more ways than one; first it restored him to his former place in the esteem of Lady Ruth, which his refusal to do her foolish errand had lost him, and now it works greater wonders, snatching him from the baleful power of the actress who, unable to rule, ...
— Miss Caprice • St. George Rathborne

... The baleful sounds had hardly died away, and Mr Swiveller was still sitting in a very grim state in the clients' chair, when there came a ring—or, if we may adapt the sound to his then humour, a knell—at the office bell. Opening ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens

... yet between ourselves, we may admit that the heavier purse may weigh down the scales of Justice. When I have passed the old house and have seen that aged woman with her ruddled cheeks and her baleful eyes look the curses she dare not speak, I have many a time wished ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle

... strongest, the cunningest and the willingest our Earth ever had; these men are here; the work they have done, the fruit they have realised is here, abundant, exuberant on every hand of us: and behold, some baleful fiat as of Enchantment has gone forth, saying, "Touch it not, ye workers, ye master-workers, ye master-idlers; none of you can touch it, no man of you shall be the better for it; this is enchanted fruit!" On the poor workers ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle

... but work which was not to be admired. Reaching the clearing in front of his house, he dropped the heavy tongue and whipped out a red handkerchief with a sigh of relief. Also, as he wiped away the perspiration on his forehead and neck and arms, he turned baleful eyes upon the ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton

... to translate, trembling as he spoke, and wilting visibly when the baleful eyes of the fakir rested on him for a second. The fakir answered something in ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy

... 2. E.), while THOMAS proceeds to scale the wall and climb the boughs of the nearest pear-tree. Melodramatic Music. The Monster Man-trap stealthily emerges from long grass below, and fixes a baleful ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 January 11, 1890 • Various

... triumphed, superfluously justified in the eyes of their flock against this blaspheming materialist. Nay, Uriel should fall into the pit himself had digged. The elders of the congregation appealed to the magistrates; they translated with bated breath passages from the baleful book, Tradicoens Phariseas conferidos con a Ley escrida. Uriel was summoned before the tribunal, condemned to pay three hundred guldens, imprisoned for eight ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... "what dost thou with the warlike bow? Such burden best befits my shoulders, for did I not slay the fierce serpent, the Python, whose baleful breath destroyed all that came nigh him? Warlike arms are for the mighty, not for boys like thee! Do thou carry a torch with which to kindle love in human hearts, but no longer lay claim ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott

... Forsythe had quit the play and ridden forth into the darkness Rosa had regarded her teacher with baleful eyes. Gardley, too, she hated, and was only waiting with smoldering wrath until her wild, ungoverned soul could take its revenge. She felt that but for those two Forsythe would still have ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill

... resistance. General d'Arblay, more in the way of immediate intelligence, and more able to judge of its result, was deeply affected by the most gloomy prognostics. He came home at about six in the morning, harassed, worn, almost wasted with fatigue, and yet more with a baleful view of all around him, and with a sense of wounded military honour in the inertia which seemed to paralyze all effort to save the king and his cause. He had spent two nights following armed on guard, one at the Tuileries, in his duty of garde du corps to the king; the other ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay

... heathen, but not Israel." "An eclipse of the sun is an evil sign to the nations of the world; an eclipse of the moon is an evil sign to Israel, for Israel reckons by the moon, the nations of the world by the sun." It is also said that Saturn and Mars are the baleful stars, and whosoever begins a work, or walks in the way, when either of these two is in the ascendant, will come to sorrow. Astrology naturally leads to amulets and charms. Amulets are divided into two classes, approved and ...
— Hebrew Literature

... Yes, yes, his heart is great; be that my stay! Yet, tho' his truth, his faith, well-proved be, Most baleful is his presence here to me; Yea, tho' he would all ill for me undo Yet he hath power, ...
— Polyuecte • Pierre Corneille

... gave ourselves up for lost. There seemed to be no possible way to free ourselves from the baleful grip of this terrible and unlooked ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss

... He stood there, a tall, large-limbed man, brown and weather-stained, one who had endured much, wrinkled somewhat, care-marked about the brow, but very capable, and evidently as bold and daring, to the line, as he asserted himself,—he stood there, flung back, fixed, petrified, as it were, by the baleful judgment that lighted those unearthly eyes which watched him from across the table there; and though his arm be flung up over his face, half to protect, half in menace,—though his fist be clenched and swollen, his brow dark and frowning, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various

... darkness; And you'll see—what? One hanging strand of cobweb, A window-sill a half-inch deep in dust ... Speak out, old wise-men! Now, if ever, we need you. Cry loudly, lift shrill voices like magicians Against this baleful dusk, this wail of rain.... But you are nothing! Your pages turn to water Under my fingers: cold, cold and gleaming, Arrowy in the darkness, rippling, dripping— All things are rain.... Myself, this lighted room, ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay

... Daughter saved him in September, and it was but for this. Faction of the Stranger, fifty-four of them! In red shirts and smocks, as Assassins and Faction of the Stranger, they flit along there; red baleful Phantasmagory, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... with terror at a sight so baleful, demanded of the giaour what these appearances might mean, and why these ambulating spectres never withdrew their hands ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various

... least of the races in a poetic sense, have but slight regard for the interference of the stars in their poor little affairs, and in this respect are saner than many a nation which has given abundant proof of wisdom. One of their beliefs is that meteors are baleful, though under given conditions they derive from such phenomena longed-for assurance. A meteor is described as "Star run about." "That fella no good; him kill'em man!" Yet in circumstances to be mentioned they find in a meteor a sign that life has been restored to an individual whom ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield

... "I'll pit them in a kist until ye gang awa'. I've never had lodgers afore." And as she carried out the tray there was a baleful gleam in her eye as if she were vowing to herself that she would ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)

... simple, but were accompanied by such a regretful look, deepening into a baleful frown as he regarded me fixedly, that I was completely startled, and in fact so overwhelmed with astonishment that, for the moment, I was quite unable to make any reply; and before I could recover myself my father appeared to have become conscious of his singularity of manner, ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood

... exhaustive explanation I made of the crisis in this country's affairs? Did I not give you twenty-four hours in which to think it over? What were you doing—muddling your brains with French wines?—that you could not reason clearly when relieved of my baleful fascination? Were you not protected on the following day by two men, who were more your friends than mine? I proposed a straightforward bargain, which you understood as well then as you do now. You realized to the full what the interests of the country demanded, and in a rare moment ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton

... followed quickly in his footsteps. If Master Robin, dancing attendance upon his clamourous customers, could have divined the identity of the newcomers whose advent he regarded so indifferently, his purple face would have paled and his stomach failed him at the thought that the Fircone sheltered the baleful presence of the king and of his ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... the sound is borne to us as we sit in the midst of this great peace of earth and sky. When once detached, as it were, from the vague murmurs of the breathing air it becomes curiously insistent. It throbs on the ear almost like the beating of a pulse—baleful, sepulchral, like the strokes of doom. We begin counting them, wondering whether they are the guns of the enemy or our own, speculating as to the ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)

... pettiness and helplessness, under certain favourable conditions of absorption and accretion, may be made to yield. It is that dragon of lawless power which was overspreading, in his time, all the common human affairs, and infolding in its gaudy, baleful wings all the life of men,—it is that which takes from the first the speculative eye of this new speculator,—this founder of the science of things, and not of words instead of them. Here is a man of science, a born naturalist, who understands ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon

... shall not lie where it doth fall? Shall this unflagging flame, here nurs'd By everything, yea, when reversed, Blazing, in fury, brighter, wink, Flicker, and into darkness shrink, When all else glows, baleful or brave, In the keen air beyond the grave? Beware; for fiends in triumph laugh O'er him who learns the truth by half! Beware; for God will not endure For men to make their hope more pure Than His good promise, ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore

... the only business with which we have to do and that of it we must make the best. At one time we think our loves much more immortal than the stars; at another that they are mere shadows cast by the baleful sun of desire upon the shallow and fleeting water we call Life which seems to flow out of nowhere into nowhere. At one time we are full of faith, at another all such hopes are blotted out by a black ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard

... removed with his family to the house of a Chinese labourer named Chok-foo, whose brother, Ram-stam, dwelt with him. They were both honest hard-working men, but Chok-foo was beginning, as we have seen, to fall under the baleful influence of opium-smoking. Ram-stam may be said to have been a teetotaler in this respect. They were both men ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne

... that I was not the inexperienced man she had thought me; rather, I was one with two examples ever before him—one shining with the pure effulgence of Heaven, the other harsh, staring, horrible, like some baleful fire at sea. "Ah, Virginia," I concluded, "you must not misjudge me. It is a sinner who speaks to you, not a saint removed too far to help you. A sinner indeed am I, yet not utterly lost. I have a guide, a hope, ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett

... of golden stars hang o'er their heads, And seem so crowded, that they burst upon them: All dart at once their baleful influence, In leaking fire. ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden

... face ever drawn of his majesty; not even Franz Stuck's Satan has eyes so full of liquid damnation. Scattering miniature female figures, like dolls, to the winds, this monster passes over Paris, a baleful typhoon. The moral is not far to seek; indeed, there is generally a moral, sometimes an inverted one, in the Rops etchings. Order Reigns at Warsaw is a grim commentary on Russian politics quite opportune to-day. La ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker

... of a most injurious monopoly amongst the inhabitants of the settlement, which has tended to the ruin of fair trade.—The commencement of this baleful system is traced back to the administration of Governor Phillip, at which time I was not in the settlement. In a very scarce period, when all classes were labouring under every kind of privation, the officers prayed leave of the governor to charter the ship Britannia ...
— The Present Picture of New South Wales (1811) • David Dickinson Mann

... eyes was the baleful light of the wild beast. The coal-oil light, which but dimly lit up the room, threw a yellow shade upon their dark, brutal faces, making them look like emissaries from the evil one, dancing in fiendish glee over some ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith

... thou ignis fatuus, misleading the steps of benighted ignorance: thou pickle-herring in the puppet-show of nonsense: thou faithful recorder of barbarous idiom: thou persecutor of syllabication: thou baleful meteor, foretelling and facilitating the rapid approach of Nox ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... Man, investigating monster, will not let me rest in peace. I am ta'en from friends and kindred, from my newly-wedded bride, And exposed—it's really shameless—on a microscopic slide. Sure some philbacillic person a Society should start For Protection of Bacilli from the Doctor's baleful art. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 21, 1891 • Various

... are made to feel that the subjects of the Byzantine throne, with their musical speech, that Constantinople with her libraries and schools, will all soon fall a prey to the ravening and barbarous Turk. This brightening light of the Western sky contending with the baleful gloom which is settling down over the East, is one of the most happy contrasts in historical literature. Then comes the end, the preparations and skill of the savage invader, the futile but heroic defence, the overwhelming ruin which struck ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison

... ill-favor with which he was already regarded. The court of Castile, once so famous for chastity and honor, sank to the lowest ebb of infamy, the shadow of which, seeming to extend over the whole land, affected nobles and people with its baleful influence. All law was at an end: the people, even while they murmured against the King, followed his evil example; and history shrinks from the scenes of debauchery and licentiousness, robbery and murder, which desecrated the land. But this state ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar

... their fists clinched as tho they were holding their tongues in leash by that means, their dark, brown faces alight with wistful, almost palpitating eagerness. The regard they fixed on his face was baleful in its intentness. ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day

... to the theme, now laid aside too long, The baleful burthen of this honest song,[sc] Though all her former functions are no more, She rules the circle which she served before. 40 If mothers—none know why—before her quake; If daughters dread her ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron

... earnest. I was up on the bridge with the signalmen, and one minute we were up in the air and the next the black sea yawned beneath us. I had my sea legs by this time. There were two or three lights bobbing about and a very powerful lighthouse light cast a baleful gleam every five seconds. The officer of the deck said we were about twenty miles from our destination and that we would hardly get in until after four in the morning when there was high tide, and if not then, not until the afternoon. Bye-and-bye we saw a light bobbing up and down in the swell ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie

... furnace, and a passing-bell; Grim vitreous gloom, and one low, raking gleam From a spent sun that spills its passive beam Athwart a smouldering city. Comes the smell Of sweat and labour. The sad, sullen knell Booms in the brain. As in a baleful dream A panting siren, veiled with hissing steam, Shrieks like a ...
— Iolaeus - The man that was a ghost • James A. Mackereth

... woods, and reached a district that was new in every sense. Entering a little gorge, to me it seemed that nature had been cursed there ages ago, and still carried the sign of the malediction in the sooty darkness of the rocks—jagged, tormented, baleful—that rose on either hand. Nothing grew upon them save a low wretched turf, and this only in patches. Beyond, the metamorphic rock gave place to red sandstone, and the ground sloped down into the little coal basin of Firmi. What a change of ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker

... "Ave! Buddha able to unravel retribution and dispel grievances! Should any human being lie in sickness, and his family be solicitous on his account; or should any one have met with evil spirits and come across any baleful evils, we have the means to effect ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin

... Let his baleful breath shed blight and death On herb and flower and tree; And brooks and ponds in crystal bonds Bind fast, ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various

... were throngs of eager men, women and children, interspersed with muscular, black bearded soldiers who cast threatening, baleful eyes on the ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various

... gloom, that low'rs upon thy brow; These days of love and pleasure charm not thee; Too slow these gentle constellations roll; Thou long'st for stars, that frown on human kind, And scatter discord from their baleful beams. ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson

... her head and favoured the interrupter with a baleful stare, whereupon Mr. Porson, scratching his neck feebly, glanced ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs

... that supposed power over his unfortunate prisoner. The Jew sat with his mouth agape, and his eyes fixed on the savage baron with such earnestness of terror, that his frame seemed literally to shrink together, and to diminish in size while encountering the fierce Norman's fixed and baleful gaze. The unhappy Isaac was deprived not only of the power of rising to make the obeisance which his terror dictated, but he could not even doff his cap, or utter any word of supplication; so strongly was he agitated by the conviction that tortures and death were ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott

... sage Washington, from hill to hill, Plays round his foes with more than Fabian skill, Retreats, advances, lures them to his snare, To balance numbers by the shifts of war. For not their swords alone, but fell disease Thins his chill camp and chokes the neighboring seas. The baleful malady, from Syrius sent, floats in each breeze, impesting every tent, Strikes the young soldier with the morning ray, And lays him lifeless ere the close of day, Far from his father's house, his mother's care, And all the ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow

... rested its sleek, black head upon its huge forepaws and seemed to sleep. I stood, fearing to move lest I should rouse it into malignant life once more. But at least I was able to think clearly now that the baleful eyes were off me. Here I was shut up for the night with the ferocious beast. My own instincts, to say nothing of the words of the plausible villain who laid this trap for me, warned me that the animal ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle

... himself with shaking the blind man; then he bent suddenly. He had seen the broken links. With ominous deliberation he turned his vast weight upon them. His baleful pink eyes fastened ...
— Slaves of Mercury • Nat Schachner

... cast a shadow in advance? Does premeditated crime spread a baleful aura which affects certain highly-strung temperaments just as the sensation of a wave of cold air rising from the spine to the head may be a forewarning of epilepsy or hysteria? John Trenholme had cause to think so one bright June morning in 1912, and he has never ceased to believe it, ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy

... hero, and a man; that his martial spirit was tempered by the love of private and public justice; and that Louis was the father of his people, the friend of his neighbors, and the terror of the infidels. Superstition alone, in all the extent of her baleful influence, [93] corrupted his understanding and his heart: his devotion stooped to admire and imitate the begging friars of Francis and Dominic: he pursued with blind and cruel zeal the enemies of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon



Words linked to "Baleful" :   minacious, minatory, ominous, threatening, maleficent, baneful, alarming, sinister



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