"Beldame" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... her cane). Those are bold words, Master Benjamin Franklin. Are you not feared to speak them? (Looks half-fearfully over her left shoulder.) Folk might think you were in league with—with strange powers! (There is a touch of the eighteenth-century beldame in her as ...
— Patriotic Plays and Pageants for Young People • Constance D'Arcy Mackay
... The Beldame then: "The fool and blind! Such mad perverseness who may apprehend?" - "Nay; there's no madness in it; thou shalt find Thy law ...
— Poems of the Past and the Present • Thomas Hardy
... whole." O happy they! (so into thought I fell) After life's endless babble they sleep well: My turn is next: dispatch me: for the weird Has come to pass which I so long have feared, The fatal weird a Sabine beldame sung, All in my nursery days, when life was young: "No sword nor poison e'er shall take him off, Nor gout, nor pleurisy, nor racking cough: A babbling tongue shall kill him: let him fly All talkers, as he ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... taken by surprise, was some time before she could shake off the old beldame's hateful caresses; but at last getting free and tucking up her hair, which her imaginary mother-in-law had clawed about her ears, she exclaimed in ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... fell to work. "Human Justice" rushed before me in novel guise, a red, random beldame, with arms akimbo. I saw her in her house, the den of confusion: servants called to her for orders or help which she did not give; beggars stood at her door waiting and starving unnoticed; a swarm of children, sick and quarrelsome, ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... blast, detonation, rush, eruption, displosion^, torrent. turmoil &c (disorder) 59; ferment &c (agitation) 315; storm, tempest, rough weather; squall &c (wind) 349; earthquake, volcano, thunderstorm. berserk, berserker; fury, dragon, demon, tiger, beldame, Tisiphone^, Megaera, Alecto^, madcap, wild beast; fire eater &c (blusterer) 887. V. be violent &c adj.; run high; ferment, effervesce; romp, rampage, go on a rampage; run wild, run amuck, run riot; break the peace; rush, tear; rush headlong, rush ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... been when Nature's simple face Perennial youth possessed and winning grace; But who shall dare, in this refining age, With Nature's praise to soil his snowy page? What polish'd lover, unappall'd by sneers Dare court a beldame of six thousand years, When every clown with microscopick eyes The gaping furrows on her forehead spies?— 'Good sir, your pardon: In her naked state, Her wither'd form we cannot chuse but hate; But fashion's art the waste of time repairs, Each wrinkle ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... a breadfruit and that I was under the greatest tree of that variety I had ever seen, a hundred feet high and spreading like a giant oak. In the topmost branches was the tottering beldame I had saluted, and in both her hands the staff, a dozen feet long. She was threshing the fruit from the tree with astounding energy and agility, her scanty rags blown by the wind, and her emaciated, naked figure in its arboreal surroundings ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... attended by dogs. Squire Russell, of Tye Oak, always lost his hare at the sink-hole of a drain near by the old lady's house. One day the dogs caught hold of the hare by its hind quarters, but it escaped down the drain, and Squire Russell, instantly opening the old beldame's door, found her rubbing the part of her body corresponding to that by which the hound had seized the hare. Squire Caryll, however, declined to be hard on the broomstick and its riders, as the following entry in the records of the Court Leet, ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... were not out of my mouth before there was a thumping upon the floor outside, and the voice of the beldame spoke sharply: ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... the first; 'gane is he, and sma' loss wi' him! An' yon old beldame over at St. Abbs, she kens weel how to keep a lass wi' a tocher—so what does the Master but sends a letter ower to our Prior, bidding him send two trusty brethren, as though from the King, to conduct ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 'you can thus turn from the cup of joy, sparkling and overflowing as it is?'—'Yes,' said Wollmar, 'when one finds a spider in it; and why not? In your eyes, to be sure, Nature decks herself out like a rosy-checked maiden on her bridal day. To me she appears an old, withered beldame, with sunken eyes, furrowed cheeks, and artificial ornaments in her hair. How she seems to admire herself in this her Sunday finery! But it is the same worn and ancient garment, put off and on some ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... How youth was free from sorrow and from care, That thou shouldst dwell with me, and leave the old. Sure dost not like me!—Shrivel'd hag of hate, My phiz, and thanks to thee, is sadly long; I am not either, beldame, over strong; Nor do I wish at all to be thy mate, For thou, sweet Fury, art my utter hate. Nay, shake not thus thy miserable pate; I am yet young, and do not like thy face; And, lest thou shouldst resume the wild-goose chase, I'll tell thee something all thy heat to assuage, —Thou wilt not ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... beldame harshly. "Things have come to a pretty pass when our homes may be treated like common gaols. Couldn't all your men catch one poor forester without this ado? Come! clear out, you and your robber, on the instant, ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... he might be," said I, with a dubious accent, thinking of the heather above the myrtle and MacCailein's head on a post "Did you hear of the Macaulay beldame shot ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... done else than ask the pride of this old beldame whether it is better to risk eternal damnation, or to give up that tyrannical power over the poor nuns, which the hand of Death will soon deprive ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... greedy beldame; "but I'll have a sheep-skin cap for the boy, and a horn spoon." This demand was also granted; after which she made signs to the lad, who swung his head to and fro, at the same time distorting his features with a wild and terrible ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... Diseased Nature oftentimes breaks forth In strange eruptions; oft the teeming Earth Is with a kind of cholic pinch'd and vex'd By the imprisoning of unruly wind Within her womb; which, for enlargement striving, Shakes the old beldame Earth, and topples down Steeples and moss-grown towers. At your birth, Our grandam Earth, having this distemperature, In passion shook." 1 King Henry ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson |
