"Baleful" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Spanish monarchies; that he would only see town after town pared away from his territory, until no ground was left for him to stand on, and make terms with the victor. He reminded him, that the baleful horoscope of Abdallah had predicted the downfall of Granada, and that experience had abundantly shown how vain it was to struggle against the tide of destiny. The unfortunate monarch listened, says the Arabian annalist, without so much as moving an eyelid; and, after ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... and, in this brief moment given to hope, sent proposals of peace to the Emperor Alexander. A superior officer of the enemy 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 the disaster to his sovereign, whose only answer was the conflagration of ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... Peterloos, Tenpound Franchises, Tarbarrels and Guillotines;—and from this present date, if one might prophesy, some two centuries of it still to fight! Two centuries; hardly less; before Democracy go through its due, most baleful, stages of Quackocracy; and a pestilential World be burnt up, and have begun to grow green and ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... contained, the reading of those pages was to be a repellent task to him; it was a task to which he could not bring himself at the moment; to-night, in the privacy of his own chamber, he would sift Mr. Taggett's baleful fancies. Thus temporizing, Mr. Slocum dropped the volume into his pocket, locked the office door behind him, and wandered down to Dundon's drug-store to kill the intervening hour before supper-time. Dundon's was the aristocratic lounging place ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Sigbrit, the woman who had played such a conspicuous and baleful part in Christian's life, she deserted her benefactor at the first sign of his coming ruin and ended her days in her native Holland, bemoaning to the last the loss of her "little dove," whom she had seen raised almost to a throne and had ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... fair. He had rarely seen her resting. Now the shapely hands were folded together in a beautiful stillness—and then the breeze had waved aside a flower, and a sunbeam, darting through the trellis, fell upon the stone in her ring and made it sparkle with a baleful fire! ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... drew a baleful breath between her teeth. Suddenly she turned, and with hanging head slowly made her ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... was in store for the island. No matter. This sirocco, of which older inhabitants might well complain, had so far exerted no baleful influence upon him. Quite the reverse. Under its tender moistening touch his frame, desiccated in the tropics, seemed to open out, even as a withered flower uncloses its petals in water. In Africa all this thoughts and energies had been concentrated upon ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... Parliament elected in 1790 the Tories 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
... him also to be what you could never be. I never measured him against you. What was his was all of me worth the having, and was given always; there was no change. What was yours was given only when in your presence, and then with hatred of myself and you—given to some baleful fascination in you. For a time, the more I struggled against it the more it grew, for there was nothing that could influence a woman which you did not do. Monsieur, if you had had Robert Moray's character and your ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Sincere and pious as the Czar undoubtedly was, this agreement, which was accepted by the other monarchs, excepting George IV. of England, did not produce the results which one might suppose from its name, the Holy Alliance. It was used not only to stifle the spirit of liberty in western Europe, but its baleful influence was felt in Italy, Spain, and Greece. In effect it was a trades- union in which the allied crowned-heads undertook to stifle popular liberty wherever it showed signs of life. When Alexander explained his proposal to the English commissioners ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... from realising: a Maltese cross of old gold, set with four uncut emeralds. 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
... first visit to the Continent. On our outward journey we halted at Brussels, in those days a bright and happy city with nothing in its cheerful, prosperous air to suggest that in less than a year there would descend upon it the baleful shadow of the Great War. Much in the old Germany appealed powerfully to our son, and even of the new Germany, with its energy and its zeal for learning, he was something of an admirer. But he hated in modern Germany its brazen materialism and boastful ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... the baleful light streamed far up into the rapidly darkening air; a private signal had been given to one of his men, and it was now too late to remonstrate. I rushed to my own boat, calling on a boy, who sometimes accompanied me ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... for delight; but from the oak, Leafless and sapless through decaying age, The screech-owl chants her fatal-boding lays. Within my breast care, danger, sorrow dwell; Hope and revenge sit hammering in my heart: The baleful babes of angry Nemesis Disperse their ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... no doubt as to the meaning of the column of flame that turned the darkness into day behind them. It was so near that they could hear its ominous roar, while the black forest walls on either side of the river were bathed in a crimson glow from its baleful light. A vast cloud of smoke, through which shot millions of sparks, trailed and eddied above it, while, with the hoarse voice of escaping steam, the blazing ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... barn a closet where Davie kept his garden tools, and which was seldom entered by any one save himself. There he deposited the chest, which had already begun to exercise a baleful influence, and which was destined to work him ...
— Tom, The Bootblack - or, The Road to Success • Horatio Alger
... thunder-storm heralded by that first destructive discharge, had set in, the green and baleful glare of the livid lightning illuminating the scene until it became almost as light as day; while the crashing roll of the thunder was absolutely continuous, and so deafening that I felt stunned and ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... qualities of Mrs. Sawbridge, a gift for silent, pallid stiffness, a disposition, tactful but unsuccessful, to "change the subject," an air of being about to leave the room in disdain, had never shone with such baleful splendour. Our interest here is rather with the effect of these remarkable disputes, which echoed in Sir Isaac's private talk long after Georgina had gone again, upon Lady Harman. He could not leave this topic of feminine emancipation alone, once it had been set going, and though Ellen ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... a stronger rage at every word which he uttered. The baleful light of her dark eyes grew more fiery in its concentrated ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... discipline. His present life of comparative ease and expected wealth was the very worst thing for him as man and as artist. Like an over-fertilized plant he went to leaf and bore little fruit. And thus again Clark's Field, with its delayed expectations, had a baleful influence upon a new generation of human beings. The Davises had just enough money to wander loose over Europe, disturbed, as Addie had once been disturbed, by the hope of ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... 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 ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... building from the fields which lie between it and the town. The flying afterguard of the late storm was hurrying across the sky, the fields were sodden, and rainpools lay here and there reflecting the dull steely hue of the heavens. A single light burned red and baleful in one window, and right over the black bulk of the gaol one star beamed. It seemed to me like a promise of mercy beyond, and I went back to my hotel filled with thoughts ...
— The Making Of A Novelist - An Experiment In Autobiography • David Christie Murray
... in waves from the top of the head and eyes. It redounds to the other person's good. Have an eunuch near you—it tends to make semen go to the head and gives the mental mouth something to think of. It could be used in a baleful way if one had will power over another person like hypnotism—(Svengali and Trilby)—In hypnotism the will goes on the same lines as psychological influence." The Jews, he said, lay around temples so much that their life had to go into sensuality ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... McCalister, after one or two minor exhibitions of wit concluded by dropping a heavy ruler over the partition of the old man's desk in such a way that it crashed down upon his head as he sat stooping over his writing. Tom, who had been watching the proceedings with a baleful eye, sprang off his stool and made across the office at the offender. McCalister seemed inclined for a moment to brazen it out, but there was a dangerous sling about Tom's shoulders and a flush of honest indignation upon his face. "I didn't ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... 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
... but gazed at Sawyer's grim face from beneath his heavy brows with a baleful intensity. Then ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... lie in heaps together, Smitten by the deadly volley, rolled in blood upon the heather; And the Hanoverian horsemen, fiercely riding to and fro, Deal their murderous strokes at random.— Ah my God! where am I now? Will that baleful vision never vanish from my aching sight? Must those scenes and sounds of terror haunt me still by day and night? Yea, the earth hath no oblivion for the noblest chance it gave, None, save in its latest refuge—seek ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... and stood before him. He also smiled, but his smile had something baleful in it. He put the hands of the Golden Maid into the great soft hand of the Titan, and he said, "O Epimetheus, Father Zeus would be reconciled with thee, and as a sign of his good will he sends thee this lovely goddess to ...
— The Golden Fleece and the Heroes who Lived Before Achilles • Padraic Colum
... look of baleful resentment in the black-fringed eyes. She remarked the stubby white hand with its carmine nails slowly rubbing a spot on the opposite arm, where she had grasped it a ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... such civilized nations as the Greeks and Romans, or lingering in strange and now meaningless ceremonies such as the one I have just described, this primitive idea of the individual who is harmful to the community. From being baleful he became sacred. They cast him out of their city, as the Jews did their scapegoat, to wander in desert places, and as the Greeks did in a city festival which was older than the Homeric gods among them, and which symbolized, in ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... 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 ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... continued to lower at him unwaveringly; it was almost bitter and righteous enough to be funny. Waters surveyed it for a space of moments with a faint interest in its mere grotesqueness; it did not change nor shift under his scrutiny, but continued to glare inhumanly like a baleful lamp. He humped a thin shoulder in resignation and turned away. When he was halfway to the gate, he heard behind him the foreman ordering the gatekeeper not to admit ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... The baleful fortune of the Pandora, now folded her wings and perched upon the taffrail. By hugging the coast of New Guinea she would have won a clear passage through these wreck-strewn straits of Torres, but the navigators of those days counted on clear water ...
— Voyage of H.M.S. Pandora - Despatched to Arrest the Mutineers of the 'Bounty' in the - South Seas, 1790-1791 • Edward Edwards
... I so long have dwelt In noisome cities, whence Thy sacred works Are ever banished from my sight; where lurks Each baleful passion man has ever felt. Here human skill is shown in shutting out All sight and thought of things that God hath made; Lest He should share the constant homage paid To Mammon, in the hearts of men devout. O, it was fit that he[2] upon whose head Weighed ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... gone long, but returned to stand beside the bunk, looking down upon Essie with eyes that in the dimness of the illy-lighted cabin shone with the baleful gleam of some ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... cause; but Jove, and Fate, And gloomy Erinnys, who combined to throw A strong delusion o'er my mind, that day I robb'd Achilles of his lawful prize. What could I do? a Goddess all o'erruled, Daughter of Jove, dread Ate, baleful power Misleading all; with light step she moves, Not on the earth, but o'er the heads of men. With blighting touch, and many hath caused ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... salvation. Like a devout martyr, he wishes to satisfy the implacable justice of men with blood. But how much sweeter for you (and safer, at the same time) to see him raise some holy altar to the glory of God, and hide in the blessed peace of the cloister the baleful lustre of the name he has already abjured! He is so much swayed by the spirit of his order, he has conceived such a love for self-denial, for humility and poverty, that it will need all my efforts and much help from on high to make him agree ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... possible to walk. The clouds opened their fountains, raining so that you would say they could never rain again. Lightning blazed forth with more than the light of day, and the roar of the thunder caused the earth to shake. Baleful gleams tipped the black cones of the trees and fitfully scampered like fireflies over the waste. Unclean goblins dogged the travellers and threw themselves upon the ground in their path and obstructed them in a thousand ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... onlookers retreated in poor order, their teeth chattering. Their mammies had told them about the Voodoo Eye. They remembered the tales whispered in the slave quarters about people being prayed to death by these baleful creatures of ill omen! They weren't going to ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... worked to a common end—silence. Hers in the hope that the effects of the galvanic current—if that did it—would die away and leave him rest for his; his in the fear that behind the unraised curtain that still hid his early life from himself was hidden what might become a baleful power ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... to the other side in some way," said Mrs. Corwin. "It is at Venice that the trouble with Balderstone is to come, and that Osborne topples him over into the Grand Canal, and rescues you from his baleful influence." ...
— A Rebellious Heroine • John Kendrick Bangs
... Delgrado shot a baleful glance at the hunchback; but ignored his comment. "If it is not indiscreet of a parent to betray some interest in a son's prospective happiness, may I venture again to inquire ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... nature, in spite of its natural 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 ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... But she strove to repress this strength of attachment, which she felt would otherwise become too powerful for her reason to control; and if she did not entirely succeed, at least the efforts she made and the continual exercise of mind enabled her in some degree to counteract the baleful effects of morbid anxiety and overweening attachment. At length her apprehensions were relieved for a time by a letter from Colonel Lennox. An engagement with the enemy had taken place, but he had escaped unhurt. He repeated his vows of unalterable affection; and Mary felt ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... up for lost. There seemed to be no possible way to free ourselves from the baleful grip of this terrible and ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss
... though she were living through some hideous nightmare, she began to scoop up the gems from her lap and allow them to trickle back through her fingers. They flashed and scintillated brilliantly, even in the meager light. They seemed alive with some premonitory, baleful fire. ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... wolf glared the circle round Through baleful, blue-lit eye, Not unforgetful of his debt. "Now, heed ye how ye draw the net." Quoth he: "I'll do some damage yet Or ere my ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... Polybus, I took my way To Cyrrha's temple, on that fatal day 90 When by the son the trembling father died, Where the three roads the Phocian fields divide; If I the Sphynx's riddles durst explain, Taught by thyself to win the promised reign; If wretched I, by baleful Furies led, With monstrous mixture stain'd my mother's bed, For hell and thee begot an impious brood, And with full lust those horrid joys renew'd; Then, self-condemn'd to shades of endless night, Forced from these orbs the bleeding balls of sight; 100 Oh, hear! and aid the ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... 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 ...
— The Ranger - or The Fugitives of the Border • Edward S. Ellis
... empire is at hand." All shrank back aghast, and left the denouncer of woe standing alone in the centre of the hall. He was an ancient and hoary man in the rude attire of a dervise. Age had withered his form without quenching the fire of his spirit, which glared in baleful lustre from his eyes. He was (say the Arabian historians) one of those holy men termed santons who pass their lives in hermitages in fasting, meditation, and prayer until they attain to the purity of saints and the ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... and gay, Blooming in thy early May, Never may'st thou, lovely flow'r, Chilly shrink in sleety show'r! Never Boreas' hoary path, Never Eurus' poisonous breath, Never baleful stellar lights, Taint thee with untimely blights! Never, never reptile thief Riot on thy virgin leaf! Nor even Sol too fiercely view Thy bosom blushing still ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... 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 ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... protected the cots from any draught through the opening door. Cecil, with an action of settled despair, turned from the spectacle, and buried his face for one last moment of comfort in Vida Levering's shoulder; while Sara, with a baleful ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... strange fascination I had experienced. I blushed, and drew my veil over my face,—resolving henceforth to set a guard over my eyes as well as my lips. It was the first dark-flashing glance I had met since I had left Grandison Place. It was the last expiring gleam of a baleful flame. I knew it must be; and, leaning back in the carriage, I sunk into one of those reveries which I used to indulge in childhood,—when the gates of sunset opened to admit my wandering spirit, and the mysteries of cloud-land were ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... we voyaged Lake Bennett, Tagish, then Windy Arm, Sinister, savage and baleful, boding us hate and harm. Many a scow was shattered there on that iron shore; Many a heart was broken straining ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... withdrawing of, and narrowing the circulation, without a proportionate reduction of taxation, by which the means of all but those who lived upon the taxes were reduced one-half in value, the greatest distress existed; that these were aggravated by the baleful system called free-trade, by which a competition of foreign silks, gloves, and other articles was permitted with our own manufactures; that by these means the people were driven to desperation and frenzy, and that to these causes were to be ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... that 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 ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... was seen. But we knew he must still exist somewhere among the Termans. Under that baleful inventive genius their weapons seemed to multiply, and we were forced to tax our scientists to the utmost in order to have weapons, of offense—and ...
— Walls of Acid • Henry Hasse
... democracy. In the most praiseworthy instances even, men lacked that repose, that fine tact, which were found universally in the higher orders in the mother country. The defect was ineradicable, according to most; for it had its baleful origin in popular institutions themselves. In justice it must be added that there were some who, in consequence of the American passion for traveling, entertained a mild hope that in time this rudeness would wear away, and this total ignorance of good breeding would be enlightened ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... 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 ...
— Miss Caprice • St. George Rathborne
... by any smile to Imogen's rather baleful lightness, nor did she, by any penitence of look, respond to Mr. Potts's urgency. She sat silent for a moment, and when she spoke it was in a changed voice, dulled, monotonous. "If you insist on my speaking, now—and openly,—I must say to you that I altogether disapprove of your project. ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... to shell their scattered groups. Like wasps roused to fury, the ghazis rushed together as if for a charge, and lines of Afghan regulars came into view. The deceitful haze yielded up its secret. Burrows' brigade stood face to face with 15,000 Afghans. Moreover some influence, baleful to England, kept back those Asiatics from their usually heedless rush. Their guns came up and opened fire on Burrows' line. Even the white quivering groups of their ghazis forebore to charge with their whetted knives, but clung to a gully which afforded good cover 500 yards away ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... 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 ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... 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 ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... that baleful hour, When first ambition struck at regal power; And thus polluting honour in its source, 395 Gave wealth to sway the mind with double force. Have we not seen, round Britain's peopled shore, Her useful sons exchang'd for useless ore? Seen all her triumphs but destruction haste, Like flaring tapers ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... 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
... appeared between the Professor's eyes—but he stood his ground defiantly. "Yes," went on Bunker thrusting out his jaw in a baleful leer at his rival, "for many years he has had the proud distinction of being the ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... proceed to consider the use of tobacco as a habit, which modern physicians are pleased to consider so pestiferous and baleful, let us attend for a few moments to what has been said concerning its culture and manufacture. Mr. Jefferson, in his Notes, says that its culture is productive of infinite wretchedness; that it is found ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... Cicero and Pliny are famous, and the letters of Plato and Aristotle have been studied by a select few. Even Homer, who seems to avoid all reference to the art of writing as if it were an unclean thing, tells us of "the baleful characters" written on folded tablets, and sent by Proetos to the King of Lycia. Criticism, it is true, not so long ago doubted the facts of the story and tried to resolve the characters and the tablets into a child's drawings on the slate. But archology has come to the rescue of Proetos, ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... baleful thread through the whole web of life from beginning to end," says Dr. Holcomb. "We are born into the atmosphere of fear and dread, and the mother who bore us had lived in the same atmosphere for weeks and months before we were born. We are ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... and listened, his mind growing more irresolute every moment. Now all was certain. Impossible to have any further doubt. That letter! the woman confirmed its meaning. Gwynplaine the lover and the beloved of a duchess! Mighty pride, with its thousand baleful heads, stirred his wretched heart. Vanity, that powerful agent within us, works us ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... baleful glimmers of the storm, below the dark disorder of the clouds that extend and unfurl over the earth like evil spirits, they seem to see a great livid plain unrolled, which to their seeing is made of mud and water, ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... smite thy head by day, Nor the pale moon with sickly ray Shall blast thy couch; no baleful star Dart his malignant ...
— The Psalms of David - Imitated in the Language of The New Testament - And Applied to The Christian State and Worship • Isaac Watts
... 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
... devouring flame! how many bleed By shameful variance betwixt man and man! How many pine in want and dungeon glooms, Shut from the common air, and common use Of their own limbs! how many drink the cup Of baleful grief, or eat the bitter bread Of misery! Sore pierced by wintry winds, How many shrink into the sordid hut Of cheerless poverty! How many shake With all the fiercer tortures of the mind, Unbounded passion, madness, guilt, remorse, Whence tumbled headlong from the ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... other, and at last he applied his ear to the keyhole of the casket containing the Ashes of Madame Blavatsky. When the Inquiring Soul had completed his course of instruction he declared himself the Ahkoond of Swat, fell into the baleful habit of standing on his head, and swore that the mother who bore him was a pragmatic paralogism. Wherefore he was held in high reverence, and when the two other gentlemen were hanged for lying the Theosophists elected him to the leadership ...
— Fantastic Fables • Ambrose Bierce
... trite. That anything is really gained by huge imports and exports when people live in slums and have their creative work impulses thwarted is not my idea of value. Factories are necessary to a large production and a large population, but the idea of quantity seems somehow to have exercised a baleful magic on the minds of men. England became "great" through its mills, and its working people were starved and stunted, body and soul. Of what avail are our Lawrences and Haverhills when we learn that in the draft examinations the mill towns showed ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... a fortnight of calm, dry, and warm weather. There is a hazy atmosphere, and the sun rises and sets wearing a blood-red aspect. At night the moon, dimly and indistinctly seen (now a crescent), has a somber and baleful appearance. This is strange at this season of the year; it is like Indian summer in May. The ground is dry and crusted, and apprehensions are felt for the crops, unless we have rain in a few days. ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... defence was made with that most potent of female weapons, the tongue. Never did invaded hen-roost make a more vociferous outcry. It was all in vain. The house was sacked and plundered, fire was set to each corner, and in a few moments its blaze shed a baleful light far over the Tappan Sea. The invaders then pounced upon the blooming Laney Van Tassel, the beauty of the Roost, and endeavored to bear her off to the boat. But here was the real tug of war. The mother, the aunt, and the strapping negro wench, all flew to the rescue. The struggle continued ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... empty-vaulted night, At every fall smoothing the raven down Of darkness till it smiled! I have oft heard My mother Circe with the Sirens three, Amidst the flowery-kirtled Naiades, Culling their potent herbs and baleful drugs, Who, as they sung, would take the prisoned soul, And lap it in Elysium: Scylla wept, And chid her barking waves into attention, And fell Charybdis murmured soft applause. Yet they in pleasing slumber lulled the sense, And in sweet madness robbed it of itself; But such a sacred and home-felt ...
— L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas • John Milton
... Divine service in the evening, and we know that there has been no sickness in the house. I feel certain that before long they will withdraw their subscription. I have good reason to believe that their friend, Mr. Coleman, exercises a very baleful influence upon them. However, God's will be done! These are the trials which His servants who minister to His flock must expect. Good-bye, my dear Thomas. Mamma and Tryphosa send their love. Give diligence to make your calling ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... ne'er in his life-day, late or early, such hardy heroes, such hall-thanes, found! To the house the warrior walked apace, parted from peace; {11a} the portal opended, though with forged bolts fast, when his fists had struck it, and baleful he burst in his blatant rage, the house's mouth. All hastily, then, o'er fair-paved floor the fiend trod on, ireful he strode; there streamed from his eyes fearful ...
— Beowulf • Anonymous
... her, 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
... baleful reptiles was gliding across the path of the pioneers, as if to apprise them of the appropriateness of the name of the gulch, which was ...
— The Phantom of the River • Edward S. Ellis
... grasp a hand, then start to find it gone; The spendthrift and the sordid usurer, Who knew no sentiment save lust for gold; The bloated drunkard, sinking 'neath the weight Of wassail inclination dissolute; The youth, who, following his baleful steps, Reeled for the first time from intemperance; And she who had forgot her covenant, In brazen infamy and unwept shame;— The good, the bad, the impious and unjust, The energetic and the indolent, The adolescent and the venerable, Passed by, pursuant of their ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... the son of Hagal. King Hunding sent men to Hagal in search of Helgi, and Helgi had no other way to save himself than by taking the clothes of a female slave and going to grind. They sought but did not find him. Then said Blind the Baleful: ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... 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 of the ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... Again discord exerted its baleful influence, and prevented Richard from following up his victory. His opinion was constantly opposed by the other leaders, all jealous of his bravery and influence; and the army, instead of marching to Jerusalem, or even to Ascalon, as was first intended, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... a general outcry over the continent."[81] And finally, in the autumn of 1774, an able loyalist writer, looking back over the political history of the colonies from the year of the Stamp Act, singled out the Virginia resolves as the baleful cause of all the troubles that had then come upon the land. "After it was known," said he, "that the Stamp Act was passed, some resolves of the House of Burgesses in Virginia, denying the right of Parliament to tax the colonies, made their appearance. We read them ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... 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, he loves—he ...
— Polyuecte • Pierre Corneille
... by their hideous antics, should be found many who, like David of Delft, John of Leyden, and others, had been members of rhetorical chambers. The genius for mummery and theatrical exhibitions, transplanted from its sphere, and exerting itself for purposes of fraud and licentiousness, was as baleful in its effects as it was healthy in its original manifestations. Such exhibitions were but the excrescences of a system which had borne good fruit. These literary guilds befitted and denoted a people which was ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... that Garay bent upon Robert was baleful. His capture by the three and the manner in which he had been compelled to disclose the letter had been humiliating, and Robert did not doubt that the man would seek revenge. He shivered a little, feeling that as a prisoner he was in a measure ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... baleful meaning to the ears of sportive innocence, found a melancholy echo among the deeper woes of my own heart, and, if it chanced to be one of Aunt Lobelia's singing days, the "Dar' to be a Dan-yell! Dar' to be a ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... beautiful maiden With spot and stain to defile: that Judge of glory would not Allow, the Keeper of honor, but him from that deed restrained 60 The Lord, the Ruler of hosts. Went then the devilish one, The wanton [warrior-prince],[4] with [mickle] band of men, The baleful his bed to seek, where he his life should lose Quickly within one night; he had then his end attained[5] On earth ungentle [end], such as before he wrought for, 65 The mighty prince of men, while in this world he was, While he dwelt under roof of the clouds. Then fell so drunk ...
— Elene; Judith; Athelstan, or the Fight at Brunanburh; Byrhtnoth, or the Fight at Maldon; and the Dream of the Rood • Anonymous
... "The moon has a baleful influence, my son," said he in a thick voice. "And you'll come under it if you sit too long beneath its effulgence. That's what has happened to me. It makes one ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... squeaky, squeaky sound of that board plays upon your nerves, not the nerves of the ear, but the nerves of the mind, for there is more in it than the ear can convey. Every sight and every sound in this world comes to us inextricably woven into the warp which the mind supplies, and, as you listen to that baleful sound, you seem to feel with your finger points the back of each good, new knife getting sharper and sharper, and to watch its progress as it wears away at the point of greatest pressure, until the end of the blade is connected with the rest by a narrow neck, which eventually ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... one 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 ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... reptile, but without effect; for the great beast came slowly floating down in all its native hideousness, its rugged bark-like back and the rough prominences above its eyes out of the muddy water, one eye peering at us with the baleful look peculiar ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... 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 days. ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... was reluctantly fitting his wooden hand upon the blue steel. He sent a baleful yellow glare into my eyes, and stooped to pick up his ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... experience, in a very tragical degree, of many who have walked for a little while behind the Master, and then have turned away and walked no more with Him. We may well wonder; but the root of the mischief is in no baleful glitter of a sorcerer's eye without us, but it is in the weakness of our own wills and the waywardness of our own hearts, and the wandering of our own affections. We often court the coming of the evil influence, and are willing to be fascinated ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... travel, go to see that dreadful place; It is a hideous, hollow cave, they say, Under a rock that lies, a little space From the swift Barry, tumbling down apace Amongst the woody hills of Dynevoure; But dare thou not, I charge, in any case, To enter into that same baleful bower, For fear the cruel fiendes should thee ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... the baleful glooms, Amidst the soundless solitudes immense Of ranged mansions dark and still as tombs. 45 The silence which benumbs or strains the sense Fulfils with awe the soul's despair unweeping: Myriads of habitants are ever sleeping, Or dead, or ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... 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 ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... not; the lightning—fierce, vivid, and baleful—continued to flash, the thunder rolled and crashed and reverberated in one continuous deafening uproar; but the rain held off for a good five minutes longer, during which the fire aboard the schooner gained apace and spread with amazing rapidity. ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... 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 everywhere there was that ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... offerings to several divinities. Near to Biahmu there was an old temple which had become ruinous: Amenemhait III. repaired it, and erected in front of it two of those colossal statues which the Egyptians were wont to place like sentinels at their gates, to ward off baleful influences ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... peculiar light had appeared in the old surgeon's face, the dawn of a strange idea; a gloomy ray, strayed from the fires of the bottomless pit; the baleful light that illumines the way of the enthusiast. The old man remained a moment in profound abstraction, gleams of eager intelligence bursting momentarily through the cloud of sombre meditation that covered his face. Then broke the broad light of a deep, impenetrable ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... programme, was eagerly awaited. Already, whispered first from the lips of Oover and the others who had come on from the Junta, the news of his resolve had gone from ear to ear among the men. He, for his part, had forgotten the scene at the Junta, the baleful effect of his example. For him the Hall was a cave of solitude—no one there but Zuleika and himself. Yet almost, like the late Mr. John Bright, he heard in the air the beating of the wings of the Angel of Death. Not awful wings; little wings that ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... peculiar look but on three or four occasions similar to the one I am narrating, when I knew he was pondering upon the baleful curse that had cast its withering blight upon all around, until the manhood and humanity were crushed out of the people, and outrages such as the above were looked upon with complacency, and the perpetrators treated as respected and worthy citizens,—and that he was realizing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... woman's nature. That may be a fatal evening to you on which you will first attract sufficient notice to have it said of you that you were more admired than Lucy D. or Ellen M.; this may be a moment for a poisonous plant to spring up in your heart, which will spread around its baleful influence until your dying day. It is a disputed point among ethical metaphysicians, whether the seeds of every vice are equally planted in each human bosom, and only prevented from germinating by opposing ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... Innoxious while the loudest tempest blows O'er trees, that boast a less-aspiring height. As the wild fury of the whirlwind pours, With direst ruin fall the loftiest towers; And 't is the mountain's summit that, oblique, From the dense, lurid clouds, the baleful lightnings strike. ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... which gladdened the ranks of Israel as they camped by the Red Sea, shone baleful and terrible to the Egyptian hosts. The same Ark of the Covenant whose presence blessed the house of Obed-edom, and hallowed Zion, and saved Jerusalem, smote the Philistines, and struck down their bestial ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... Washington, where she had gone some four weeks previously with her niece, Madame Olenska. It was generally understood that their abrupt departure was due to Madame Olenska's desire to remove her aunt from the baleful eloquence of Dr. Agathon Carver, who had nearly succeeded in enlisting her as a recruit for the Valley of Love; and in the circumstances no one had expected either of the ladies to return for the wedding. For a moment Archer stood with his eyes ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... some portion of 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 ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... this law from producing the salutary effect expected from it, that it rendered the poison more mischievous by depriving it of the grossness which in some degree operated as an antidote to its baleful effects. The poets finding that certain limits were prescribed to them, had recourse to greater ingenuity, and by cunning transgressed the spirit while they obeyed the letter of the law. They fell to work upon well known real characters, concealed under fictitious ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... sword and a long branch of olive. But around the man sleep a wondrous and ghastly troop, not of women, but of things woman-like, yet fiendish; harpies they seem, but are not; black-robed and wingless, and their breath is loud and baleful, and their eyes drop venom—and their garb is neither meet for the shrines of God nor the habitations of men. Never have I seen (saith the Pythian) a nation which nurtured such a race." Cheered by Apollo, Orestes flies while the dread sisters yet ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... in your wrath, with your heel on the Israelite's neck, And your hand on that baleful old blade, Persecution, 'twere wisdom to reck The PHARAOH'S calm warning. Beware! Lo, the Pyramids pierce the grey gloom Of a desert that is but a waste, by a river that is but a tomb, Yet the Hebrew abides and is strong. AMENEMAN is gone to the ghosts, He the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 9, 1890. • Various
... house of Busyrane is Louis Quatorze architecture, and Amoret is chained to a renaissance column with Corinthian capital and classical draperies. Hughes' glossary of obsolete terms includes words which are in daily use by modern writers: aghast, baleful, behest, bootless, carol, craven, dreary, forlorn, foray, guerdon, plight, welkin, yore. If words like these, and like many which Warton annotates in his "Observations," really needed explanation, it is a striking proof, not only of the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... 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 ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... linked together in fanciful silver scrolls. But the rest of the man was wretched. His feet were encased in the guaraches, or sandals, of a peon. One of his eyes was so crossed that hardly more than a baleful crescent was ever visible. The other vaquero, his companion, had no relieving trait at all, either luxurious or strikingly evil. His breeches of raw leather flapped loosely from the knee down, and at the sides they were slit, revealing the dirty white of cotton calzoncillos ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... musk of Paradise[FN53]: The rose of his cheeks from Mars its ruddy colour drew, And the Archer winged the shafts that darted from his eyes. Hermes dowered the youth with his own mercurial wit, And the Great Bear warded off the baleful glance of spies. Wonder seized on the sage at the sight of the lovely boy, For the full moon kissed the earth before him, servant-wise. And indeed God the Most High had clad him in the garment of perfection and broidered it with the shining fringes of his cheeks, even ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume I • Anonymous
... more fortunate than myself in their observation of the course of public affairs. If to these evils be added the combinations and angry contentions to which such a course of things gives rise, with their baleful influences upon the legislation of Congress touching the leading and appropriate duties of the Federal Government, it was but doing justice to the character of our people to expect the severe condemnation of the past which the recent exhibitions ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Jackson • Andrew Jackson
... her, but seeing her blood flow, his love gets the better of him; he presses her to his heart, and persuades her to fly with him from the baleful air of the plain to the ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... accepted these attentions without a word of thanks, without a sign of gratitude. He appeared to be numbed, paralyzed, by the nervous shock he had undergone, and yet he was not paralyzed, for his eyes were intensely alive. They were wild, baleful; his roving glance was like poison to ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... stamping up and down the float, waving his arms and orating like Falstaff; Randall and Tombs had their heads together, and were casting what appeared to be baleful glances at Billoo. It was evident that he was not popular on ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... know misfortune, While the moons are waxing, waning, May her blessings ever linger, As the cycle brings its changes. May the strife of human passions, May all riots and dissensions, May disease and flood and fire, Lift their baleful shadows from her. Let her children cling unto her, 'Mid the wreck of mind and matter: Be her sons' and daughters' motto, Stand, united; fall, divided. God protect thee, fair Lancaster— ...
— The Song of Lancaster, Kentucky - to the statesmen, soldiers, and citizens of Garrard County. • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... to take the proffered hand; for the baleful eye of the terrible Boss was upon him. But his sullen face showed how little the words of the other ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... these the glaring lights of a couple of saloons, while back nearer timber the "red lights," the curse and shame of railroad, lumber, and mining camps in British Columbia then and unto this day, cast their baleful lure through the ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... d'ye see? Presently its proper occupant comes in and glares at me from the door, puffing with indignation. Inwardly he is saying, 'How dare you trespass, you bally young cub?' and I pretend to be quite unconscious of his baleful gaze. I know there's really nothing he can do about it. If he were in London, I expect he'd write ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... face turn livid, and I saw the hand shake upon the golden head of his cane. He was very sensitive upon the score of his foul infirmities. His eyes grew baleful as he controlled himself. Then he smiled, displaying a ruin of ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... Shall be to him a tower, To guard him from the gulf: there lies his lot, Where all things are forgot. Lust drives him on—lust, desperate and wild Fate's sin-contriving child— And cure is none; beyond concealment clear Kindles sin's baleful glare. As an ill coin beneath the wearing touch Betrays by stain and smutch Its metal false—such is the sinful wight. Before, on pinions light, Fair pleasure flits, and lures him childlike on, While home and kin make moan Beneath the grinding burden of his crime; Till, in ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... 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 for the mothers' sake; If early habits—those ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... habit. Lastly—To avoid the heat of the sun from 10 in the morning till 4 in the afternoon, and above all the night air. By a strict attention to these rules, many would escape the diseases of the climate, who annually sink under its baleful influence." ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... silver stars fading, Milky hue ript, wet of white detaching, Coals thirty-eight, baleful and burning, Scarlet, significant, hands off warning, Now and henceforth flaunt from ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... he was seated on the top of his dining-stump. Suddenly he caught sight of something that smote him into silence and for the space of a second turned him to stone. A few paces away was a weasel, gliding toward him like a streak of baleful light. For one second only he crouched. Then his faculties returned, and launching himself through the air he landed on the trunk of the maple and darted ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... but for the moment we must look backward and not forward. We must remember the stern if rude poetry inspired by our Revolutionary struggle, the romantic halo that falls upon the youthful figure of Nathan Hale, the baleful light that touches the pale face of Benedict Arnold, the romance of the Bennington fight to the followers of Stark and Ethan Allen, the serene voice of the "little captain," John Paul Jones:—"We have not struck, we have just begun our part of the fighting." ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... made her dread to go again to sleep. The white hare, the Black Spectre, but, above all, the fearful expression her alarmed fancy had felt in Woodward's eye, which was riveted upon her, she thought, with a baleful and demoniacal glance, that pierced and prostrated her spirit with its malignant and supernatural power; all these terrible images, with fifty other incoherent chimeras, flitted before the wretched ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... would have proceeded just as it did if he had been without this information. But in spite of the fact that the bear "was not much used to contending with men," "the men fled" when it "ran from its lair and shook its baleful paws." The author is evidently trying to ride two steeds going in different directions. On the one hand, he has in mind the story of the bear with which Bjarki's father was identified and which was killed by the king's ...
— The Relation of the Hrolfs Saga Kraka and the Bjarkarimur to Beowulf • Oscar Ludvig Olson
... hedgehog with baleful yellow eyes," said Ada; "I was lying half asleep in bed when suddenly I felt a sensation as of something sinister and unaccountable passing through the room. I sat up and looked round, and there, under the window, I saw an evil, ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... meanwhile, we must be content to see things as they are and pin our faith to the belief that, as the baleful effects of the current misunderstanding become more and more apparent, the mother love, of its own accord, will become sufficiently alarmed, to throw aside its lethargy and seek to make amends by devoting itself more consistently to the welfare of ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... and rode out of the still Mohawk country; and I was not sorry to leave, for it seemed to me that there was something unfriendly in the intense stillness—something baleful in the silence; and I was glad presently to see an open road and a great tree marked with Sir Lupus's mark, the sun shining on the white ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... the test was the same in kind. He knew that his friends in the thickets behind him were watching, and he was equally sure that French and savages in the thickets before him were watching too. He had no doubt the baleful eyes of Tandakora were glaring at him at that very moment, and that the fingers of the Ojibway were eager to grasp his scalp. The idea, singularly enough, caused him amusement, because his imagination, vivid as usual, leaped ...
— The Shadow of the North - A Story of Old New York and a Lost Campaign • Joseph A. Altsheler
... however, a horrific blaze, emitted from a huge focus of intolerable light, set the whole heavens aflame. As from a fresh-created baleful sun, blue and livid and golden-colored lightnings were shivered from it on all sides; dull, however, in comparison to the central ball, which, bursting instantaneously, bathed the sky, earth, and air in one insufferable glare of phosphorescent light. The deadly blue flame lit ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... immediately, she resolved to make Adam eat of the forbidden fruit, too, lest he espouse another wife after her death.[65] It required tears and lamentations on her part to prevail upon Adam to take the baleful step. Not yet satisfied, she gave of the fruit to all other living beings, that they, too, might be subject to death.[66] All ate, and they all are mortal, with the exception of the bird malham, who refused the fruit, with the words: "Is it not enough that ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... other lips they hear the one-loved name In vaunting or derision, and they weep To know that they shall never lull to sleep Those tired heads, crowned with desolating flame. Beyond the hot arena's baleful glow, Beyond the towering pomp they dimly see, They sit and watch the fateful pageants go Through war's red arch, or up to Calvary, The First Love still within their hearts impearled— Mothers of all the ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... ought to be candid with him. I told him that it was pretty generally agreed by the medical profession that when a person once got a dose of poison ivy it remained in his system for seven years, during which period it worked its baleful offices off and on with varying malignance. I recognized the fact that I had a valid claim on the Wabash company for fifty dollars a week for seven years; that the total amount of money due or paid me by said company at the end of the natural life of the ivy poison would be a trifle ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... effect little more than 60,000l., falling greatly below one half of its original estimate: so entirely did the administration of Debi Sing exhaust all the resources of the province; so totally did his baleful influence blast the very hope and spring of ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... 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, turns the heavenly volume into a curse. Owing to this practice, the Bible is, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... came an undefinable something which made me feel that she was there; a breathing influence that woke every nervous sensibility within me, and made my heart-beats so irregular that I tried to stop them lest my own presence should be betrayed. She was there, a creeping, baleful figure, blotting the moonshine with her tall shadow, as she passed, panther-like, to and fro before that closed door, or crouched against the wall in the same attitude of listening which I myself assumed. Or ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... glad when at last we lost sight of it. Then, indeed, I felt that I had left my old life behind me. And, in spite of the Lady Ysolinde's ink-pool prophecy and my love for my father (such as it was), I did not mean ever to trust myself within that baleful circle of gray and weary plain upon which the Red ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... he cared not through what mire of treachery and fraud he trailed his baleful folds, so that, at last, he could spring upon his prey. Nature had given him sagacity and strength. The curse of circumstance had humbled, but reconciled him to the dust. He had the crawl of the reptile,—he had, also, its ...
— Leila, Complete - The Siege of Granada • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... magnificence of guilt; and to fix the dreadfully excited attention upon the huge trunks of revenge, rapine, tyranny, and oppression; yet it became not less necessary to trace out the poisonous weeds, the baleful brushwood, and all the little, creeping, deadly plants, which were, in quantity and extent, if possible, more noxious. The whole range of this far-spreading calamity was sown in the hot-bed of corruption; and had risen, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... 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 ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... Sanguinetti was still the prelate's secret candidate, Pierre was worried to know how far their moral complicity in this baleful affair might go. So he resumed the conversation by saying: "It is asserted that his Holiness is on bad terms with his Eminence Cardinal Sanguinetti. Of course the reigning pope cannot look on the future pope with a very ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... things before our enemies return in the morning. Now light your torches, and come along. What a distinction it is, to provide our own light, instead of being dependent on a thing hung up in the air—a most disagreeable contrivance—intended no doubt to blind us when we venture out under its baleful influence! Quite glaring and vulgar, I call it, though no doubt useful to poor creatures who haven't the wit to make light ...
— The Princess and the Goblin • George MacDonald
... mystery of pain and suffering. When the less fit of chemical combinations or even of the lower forms of life perished in the struggle, we may regard the process with the unemotional eye of pure intelligence. But "pain, the baleful product of evolution, increases in quantity and in intensity with advancing stages of animal organisation, until it attains its highest level in man." And so it comes about that the cosmic process produces evil, ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... the stuff, and they found that the slim lad was stronger than any of them. It was an easy matter for him to lift one of the big cans of paste to a wagon without assistance. Teddy, however, stood by with hands thrust in pockets, an amused grin on his face. The baleful eye of the ...
— The Circus Boys on the Plains • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... generally ignored. He does not know what is normal and what abnormal in his physiological development, and is often the victim of groundless fears that use up his strength or send him in despair to seek assistance from the most easily available sources of information, those baleful writings and despicable quack practitioners everywhere soliciting and alarming youth, and whose career forms one of the saddest commentaries on ...
— The Renewal of Life; How and When to Tell the Story to the Young • Margaret Warner Morley
... bowl, The rich repast prepare, Reft of a crown, he yet may share the feast; Close by the regal chair Fell Thirst and Famine scowl A baleful smile upon their baffled guest. Heard ye the din of battle bray, Lance to lance, and horse to horse? Long years of havoc, urged their destined course, And through the kindred squadrons mow their way. ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... Down sank the baleful crimson sun, The northern light came out, And glared upon the ice-bound ships, And ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... point some ten feet from the secret doorway I halted my companion, and cautioning him to remain absolutely motionless until I gave the prearranged signal I quickly turned my back to the door through which I could almost feel the burning and baleful eyes of ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs |
