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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



... hard necessities of life are her physicians; they send her out to unwelcome, yet friendly toil, which, hard as it seems, has yet its healing power. But the sufferer surrounded by the appliances of wealth and luxury may long indulge the baleful apathy, and remain in the damp shadows of the valley of death till strength and health are irrecoverably lost. How Christ-like is the thought of a woman, graceful, elegant, cultivated, refined, whose voice has been trained to melody, whose fingers ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... thane's hand loose with scant ceremony. "You forget the law of the battle-field, Norman of Baddeby," he said swiftly. "The life of my captive is mine, and I am the last man to permit it to be taken because he sought a just revenge. I know too well how it feels to hate a father's murderer." He shot a baleful glance toward a half-seen figure that all this time had stood motionless in the ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz

... Quenching the proud soul's light, Smoothing the rough, the sated Staying, and withering The flowers, that, fraught with ruin, From fatal seed upspring. The paths of crooked justice Are turned into straight; The ways of Pride grow gentle, The ways of Strife and Hate; Then baleful Faction ceases, Then Health prevails alway, And Wisdom still increases, ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes

... he, "be so cruel to my own Faith! Her life ought to be all sunshine and gladness, and would be but for me, and I must sadden and darken it with the baleful imaginings of a distempered mind. I must struggle harder and pray oftener and more fervently to be preserved from myself. And now my soul feels the need of communing with the Infinite Spirit. What fitter place for adoration than the stillness of these old woods? Here worldly ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams

... together with scared giggles. They were afraid of Evelina. There was a shade of mystery about her which stimulated their childish fancies when they heard her discussed by their elders. They might easily have conceived her to be some baleful fairy intrenched in her green stronghold, withheld from leaving it by the fear of some dire penalty for magical sins. Summer and winter, spring and fall, Evelina Adams never was seen outside her own domain of old mansion-house and garden, and she had not set her slim lady ...
— Evelina's Garden • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... the sparkling 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 urge their destined course, And thro' the kindred squadrons mow their way. Ye Towers of Julius, London's lasting shame, With many ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy

... from evil things, and I am protected from the baleful deeds of those who live in their days; and ...
— Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life • E. A. Wallis Budge

... Rooney 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 ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne

... as these lotteries are generally believed to be, their very stability and the just payment of prizes but makes them the more baleful and dangerous in their influence upon the public. As carried on in Havana, the lottery business is the most wholesale mode of gambling ever witnessed. Though some poor man may become comparatively wealthy through their means, once in twenty years, ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou

... eyes, like an owl's; or, better, a wildcat's, as though they never winked. From the pupils, which were very small, the little light-colored lines radiated across very large blue irises. There was something baleful and compelling in their glare, so that even Hallowell, cool customer as he was, forgot immediately all about the man's littleness and shabbiness and bent figure, and was conscious only of the cruel, clever, watchful, unrelenting, hostile spirit. As Jack dragged him forward, ...
— The Sign at Six • Stewart Edward White

... curse with me 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 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith

... 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 ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick

... hours' time, and rode away, carrying with him the good wishes of every one in the barracks, with the exception of one who looked out at him from the windows of the sergeants' quarters, with grimly nodding head and a singularly baleful ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson

... watched the 'pretty beat', whose prettiness was mainly due to the crowd of fog-bound shipping—steamers, smacks, and sailing-vessels—now once more on the move in the confined fairway of the fiord, their baleful eyes of red, green, or yellow, opening and shutting, brightening and fading; while shore-lights and anchor-lights added to my bewilderment, and a throbbing of screws filled the air like the distant roar of London streets. In fact, every time ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers

... not to the hunt. A baleful dream I had last night. You stood upon the heath and two wild boars approached. You fled, but they pursued you and wounded you, and the blossoms under your feet were red with blood. You behold my tears. ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence

... 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 ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow

... be too many trees, so that some must be cut down; or there may be too few, and it becomes necessary to plant more. Water-courses may not flow in proper curves; hills may be too high, too low, and of baleful shapes, or their relative positions one with another may be radically bad. Any one of these causes may be sufficient in the eyes of a disciple of Feng-shui to account for the sudden outbreak of a plague, the ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles

... River. It is a jaunty and comfortable craft, as befits such vessels as afford Servians their only means of communication with the outer world. If any but Turks had been squatted in Bosnia there would have been many a smart little steamer running down the Sava and around up the Danube; but the baleful Mussulman has checked all enterprise wherever he has had any foothold. We go slowly, cleaving the dull-colored tide, gazing, as we sit enthroned in easy-chairs on the upper deck, out upon the few public ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various

... With which it welcomed the embrace of Night Has faded from the blue cheek of the West; Yet from the solemn darkness of the North, Stretched o'er the "empty place" by God's own hand, Trembles and waves that curtain of pale fire,— Tingeing with baleful and unnatural hues The winter snows beneath. It is as if Nature's last curse—the fearful plague of fire— Were working in the elements, and the skies Even as a ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard

... conversation of this seductive creature. He recalled the legends of temptations to which the Evil One used to subject the anchorites of old, by causing to appear before them the attractive but illusive forms of the heathen deities. He wondered whether he were not becoming the sport of the same baleful influence; if, like the Lamias and Dryads of antiquity, this queen of the woods were not some spirit of the elements, incarnated in human form and sent to him for the purpose of dragging his soul down ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet

... That disposition accorded with both his mental and physical make-up. Bodily he was a bundle of bones and nerves without a particle of surplus flesh. His hair was red, his complexion was sandy, and his eyes, when he was excited and angry, had a baleful expression that led some one in my presence on a certain occasion to speak of them as ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume

... and ominous followed the rash words, and Samoval, white to the lips, pondered the imperturbable captain with a baleful eye. ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini

... but, ah! no more with peace possest, With ease alluring, and with plenty blest! No more the shepherds' whitening tents appear, Nor the kind products of a bounteous year; 50 No more the date, with snowy blossoms crown'd! But ruin spreads her baleful ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins

... of fatigue, of perplexity, or of fear Converting beneficent commerce into baleful gambling Gigantic vices are proudly pointed to as the noblest No generation is long-lived enough to reap the harvest Proclaiming the virginity of the Virgin's mother Steeped to the lips in sloth which imagined itself to be pride To shirk labour, ...
— Quotations From John Lothrop Motley • David Widger

... fall with the chief enemy of her faith, and awaited with impatience his summons to speak with him. For she was anxious, now at last, to speak out her mind, and Privy Seal's agents had worked upon the religious of a poor little convent near her father's house a wrong so baleful that she could no longer contain herself. Either Privy Seal must redress or she must go to the King for justice to these poor women that had taught her the very elements of virtue and lay now ...
— Privy Seal - His Last Venture • Ford Madox Ford

... Greeks discussed, And I their frequent censure have incurred: Yet was not I the 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

... the 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 ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson

... the nation comprehended that even where the estimated value of property had been highest, the true welfare of society had diminished. They learned too late the baleful effects of this circulation of paper money; the greater part of the States and cities had nothing ...
— A Brief History of Panics • Clement Juglar

... with a 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

... moon's ray of it (pale with super-refinement through distance from our flesh and blood planet) in Comus. Pope has it, and it is the daylight side of the night half obscuring Cowper. It is only hostile to the priestly element, when that, by baleful swelling, transcends and overlaps the bounds of its office: and then, in extreme cases, it is too true to itself to speak, and veils the lamp: as, for example, the spectacle of Bossuet over the dead body of Moliere: at which the dark angels may, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... for medicine. The savage, who sincerely means to express reverence, kindness, loyalty, fidelity, may perform, in the expression of those sentiments, acts that are utterly unfitting, and therefore utterly wrong; and if so, each of these acts produces its due consequences, it may be, baleful and lamentable. Yet because he did the best he knew in the expression of these sentiments, he has not sunk, but risen in his character as a moral being,—has become better and ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody

... the fineness and truth of the motive that lies, I know, underneath every line, the letter is baleful, sinister, and weary. ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee

... 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 understands that this phenomenon lies in his department, and ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon

... Investigation as to the cause of this inexplicable outbreak was demanded. Those very chiefs had left the capital in unbounded good humor not two months before, and who was responsible for this sudden and baleful change of heart? It was a matter soon and easily settled. In the absence of military testimony to the contrary and the presence of so unanimous a party as the agent and his assistants, the fault was laid on ...
— Under Fire • Charles King

... flavors of fashionable amusement, in the hope that Margaret might find them sweet, and now at the end she had to own to herself that she had failed. It was coming Lent again, and the girl had only grown thinner and more serious with the diversions that did not divert her from the baleful works of beneficence on which Mrs. Horn felt that she was throwing her youth away. Margaret could have borne either alone, but together they were wearing her out. She felt it a duty to undergo the pleasures her aunt appointed for ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... Goil turned baleful eyes on me, and I shut up suddenly. He said, "Mr. Weston, let me repeat: no formal accusations have been made—yet. I am trying to learn certain facts. One fact I have learned already is that you are exceedingly friendly with Willy. Furthermore, ...
— Jack of No Trades • Charles Cottrell

... 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 still have ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill

... unavoidable. Coke tried to still the tumult by thundering a command to Norrie, second engineer, to throw open the throttle valve. He took the wheel in person, meaning to shape a course due east, and thus endeavor to avoid the cruiser's baleful glance. But some of the men realized instantly that this expedient would fail. They were in no mood for half measures. Norrie felt a bayonet under his left shoulder-blade. Coke was roared down, and a hoarse ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy

... and the old Caledonian Mercury was the only paper that stood by us; but it did so manfully. On the day of my arrival a bulletin was posted in the newspaper offices and on Change that McClellan and the Union army had surrendered. The baleful report was received with no little exultation by all who were engaged in the cotton trade. I sat up until midnight with the editor of the Mercury, helping him to squelch the rumor and the next morning expose the falsity of the news in ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler

... Eyes can with baleful ardour burn; Poison can breathe, that erst perfumed; There's many a white hand holds an urn With lovers hearts to ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various

... whose harmless life could hardly have excited the animosity of a demon? Against that devilish spirit nothing avails,—neither virtue nor patriotism, nor age nor youth, nor conscience nor pity. We can not even say that education is a sufficient safeguard against this baleful evil,—for most of the wretches whose crimes have so shocked humanity in recent years were men not unlettered, who have gone from the common schools, through murder to ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein

... of his long suspense. Whatever might be the purport of the words written in that fatal paper, the knowledge thereof could not be worse than the fate which had dogged his footsteps ever since that tragic night when he had first cast eyes on the baleful beauty of the Spanish maid. Yet might it not be that once again the sight of these words would send him wandering homeless o'er the world—that the stream of his uncle's benevolence might be suddenly damned by ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... 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, to whom religious ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins

... voices, and with cries and lamenting the people hurried into the streets and fell on their knees or their faces, unable to stand on the waving, trembling ground. It was an hour of terror. All lights were blown out by the storm or extinguished in the fall of houses, save one or two of baleful meaning that flickered above roofs which had caught fire. The sea could be heard advancing toward the land with tremendous roaring, driving up the channel of the Pasig and overspreading its banks on either side, while far below, and most dreadful of all, the fall could be heard of pieces ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner

... made haste 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

... Helen, baleful in her unconsciousness, had again closed her eyes. Althea looked at her, and she was aware of being angry with Helen. She was further aware that, since all was over for Franklin, she owed him something. She owed it to him at least to make ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick

... simultaneously assaulted all the points of the compass; while the lightning glared almost continuously, and the roar of the thunder was uninterrupted. Now and then a vivid zig-zag flash gored the intense darkness with its baleful blue death-light, followed by a crash, appalling as if the battlements of heaven had been shattered. Once the whole air seemed ablaze, and the simultaneous shock of the detonation was so violent, that Beryl involuntarily sank on ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... I am Prince Henry of Hoheneck, And you, Count Hugo of the Rhine! I know you, and I see the scar, The brand upon your forehead, shine And redden like a baleful star! ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... foolish trustfulness I was rash enough to add a caress and to pat her soft neck. She stopped instantly with a hysteric shudder. I knew what was passing through her mind: she had suddenly become aware of my baleful existence. ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various

... thronged the lobbies. The fame of the orator, the boldness of his exploit, curiosity as to the plan, poignant anxiety as to the party result, wonder whether a wizard had at last actually arisen with a spell for casting out the baleful spirits that had for so many ages made Ireland our torment and our dishonour—all these things brought together such an assemblage as no minister before had ever addressed within those ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge

... were strong, active, clear-brained lads, who had not yet learned to smoke cigarettes or cigars, and gave no cause to fear that they would ever do so. It is not necessary to state that neither knew the taste of beer or alcoholic drinks, nor did they wish to learn. They understood too well the baleful effects of such indulgences to be in danger of ruining their bodies and souls, as too many other youths are doing ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis

... any discovery of science, any device of civilization, could eradicate from the human heart that passion for self-expression which is the impelling force of letters. They also fail to note that, side by side with telephones and telegrams, comes the baleful reduction of postage rates, which lowers our last barrier of defence. Two cents an ounce leaves us naked at the mercy of ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier

... understood to be the 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 such fiat falls first, in its rudest shape; but on the rich master-workers ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle

... earth become! Of purest spirits a pure dwelling-place, 40 Symphonious with the planetary spheres; When man, with changeless Nature coalescing, Will undertake regeneration's work, When its ungenial poles no longer point To the red and baleful sun 45 That ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various

... upside down; to my mental vision arose sal volatile and burnt feathers, swoons and hysterics. Mahomet's dove alone can tell how all might have ended had not the Frenchman suggested a bolus. Captain No. 1 and I were commissioned to inquire into the mystery of the disappearance of that baleful mongoose. When we got out of earshot of the hotel there was the popping of a cork, and we emptied effervescing beakers to the speedy recovery of Albert the Beloved. Certes, that bull-dog had a very bad fit of dyspepsia; but the bolus did him a world of good, and before we retired ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea

... is propagated especially by observation and the personal emulation of the young; whence it is, that the introduction of new industries is best made by the immigration of skilled workmen.(390) Hence the baleful influence of such interruptions, as for instance, the repeal of the edict of Nantes. Hence too, it is, that despotism and the reign of the populace are so unfavorable to the economy of a country, where there can be no guarantee of a consistent observance and ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher

... by this woman's air of subtlety, by looks, movements, tones which she did not understand, forbade it. She could not speak with satisfaction even of Horace, feeling that Mrs. Damerel's affection, however genuine, must needs be baleful. From this point her part in the dialogue ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing

... pestilential marshes did not exist, or were confined to a very limited space; but from the decline of the Roman empire, the waters gradually encroached, until the successful exertions made by the Pontiffs in modern times to arrest their baleful progress. Before the drainage of Pope Sixtus, the marshes covered at least thirteen thousand acres of ground, which in the earlier ages was the most fruitful portion of the ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith

... 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

... 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 easier to make 100 bushels of wheat than ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various

... there kept guard the grim ferryman Charon, an infernal deity of fearful aspect. A long gray beard fell all tangled and neglected from his chin; his filthy and ragged garments were knotted over his shoulders; his eyes glittered with baleful light. He sat on a great black barge, which he pushed to and fro across the river with a pole. An immense crowd of shades was incessantly pouring to the banks,—young and old, matrons and virgins, warriors who had endured the toils of a long life and tender boys who had ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various

... 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 ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone

... is regulated not by their brain formation and possible development, but by the wealth of their parents, the parsimony of municipalities, the baleful influences of tradition and the colossally stupid idea that thorough brain cultivation is in some way antagonistic to ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane

... clasps her hands together and gazes at him in voiceless astonishment). Loved—loved me—thou! (Vehemently, coming close up to him.) I will not believe thee! (Looks hard at him.) Yes, it is true, and—baleful for us both! ...
— The Vikings of Helgeland - The Prose Dramas Of Henrik Ibsen, Vol. III. • Henrik Ibsen

... hills. —But the story." I left off, gentlemen, where the Lakeman shook the back-stay. Hardly had he done so, when he was surrounded by the three junior mates and the four harpooneers, who all crowded him to the deck. But sliding down the ropes like baleful comets, the two Canallers rushed into the uproar, and sought to drag their man out of it towards the forecastle. Others of the sailors joined with them in this attempt, and a twisted turmoil ensued; while standing ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville

... which is essential to their protection against the aggression of the strong. We deem the use of force for the collection of ordinary contract debts to be an invitation to abuses, in their necessary results far worse, far more baleful to humanity than that the debts contracted by any nation should go unpaid. We consider that the use of the army and navy of a great power to compel a weaker power to answer to a contract with a private individual, is both an invitation to speculation upon the necessities of weak and struggling ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root

... shout went up for the stranger, but an angry murmur was heard among the crowd, so easily had he won the match. Then one of the judges, a kinsman to William of the Scar, rose with trembling lip and baleful look. Quoth he, "If thou hath slain that man it will go ill with thee, let me tell thee, fellow." But the stranger answered boldly, "He took his chance with me as I took mine with him. No law can touch me to harm me, even if I slew him, so that it was fairly ...
— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle

... would say viper in the manger, who spoiled everybody else's lovers and would have none of her own. For with all Mithridata's severity, there was no getting rid of the young men, the giddy moths that flew around her brilliant but baleful candle. Not all the cold water thrown upon them, literally as well as figuratively, could keep them from her door. They filled her house with bouquets and billets doux; they stood before the windows, they sat on the steps, they ran ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett

... the placards of newsboys in London streets, and had fled home to escape from the vision, only to hear the children thank Heaven for it! She rose so suddenly that she flung the children back from their knees to their haunches. They stared up at her in wondering fear. She stepped outside the baleful circle and went striding up and down the room, fighting herself back to self-control, telling herself that the children were not to blame, yet finding them the more repulsive for their very innocence. The purer the lips, the ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes

... wig, I shall have the honour of 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 get any good of him. Thunders of applause. ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens

... the water shimmered, satin smooth and silver gray, and beyond, clean shaven William's Island loomed out of the mist, guarding the town like a sturdy bulldog. Its lighthouse beacon flared through the mist like a baleful star, and was answered by another in ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... her muscles and stood up; but Mrs. Strangeways, scarcely moving, still looked at her with baleful directness. ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing

... fearful fight between the Knight and the Dragon, whose name is Error, but at length the Knight conquered. The terrible beast lay dead "reft of her baleful head," and the Knight, mounting upon his charger, once more rode onwards with ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall

... 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, watched the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various

... grub-house, office, blacksmith shop, and beyond 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 Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor

... passage and the unrequited toil of centuries, of which the blacks were victims, must be taken into account in considering the matter of crime in connection with this race, and go far to explain a condition which otherwise would be abnormal. The baleful influences of a dead and buried past account for crime among the old and the young Negro Americans, the responsibility for which rests upon the United States rather than the Southern states, upon this nation rather than any part ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various

... finished, when she saw the Angel of Death before her. Expecting her end to come 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 Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg

... elbow, propelled him toward the lawyer, who gratified them with the look, very baleful and equally famous, with which he was said ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus

... avoid, above all things, the vice of intoxication, which he likened unto the filthy habits of swine, and to those poisonous and baleful drugs which being chewed in the mouth, are said to filch away the memory. At this point of his discourse, the reverend and red-nosed gentleman became singularly incoherent, and staggering to and fro in the excitement of his eloquence, ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens

... sum under 90,000l., and with all rigor of exaction produced in 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 ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... relied upon to resent the drop of black blood that tainted them, and with the zeal of the proselyte to visit their hatred of it upon the unfortunate blacks that fell into their hands. One curse of negro slavery was, and one part of its baleful heritage is, that it poisoned the fountains of human sympathy. Under a system where men might sell their own children without social reprobation or loss of prestige, it was not surprising that some of them should hate their distant cousins. There were not in Patesville ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt

... spreading doctrines among vulgar people, destructive of civil order and public peace. The majority of mankind every where are ignorant and credulous, and therefore are objects of compassion, and ought to be protected against the baleful influence of such men as seduce them from their duty and subjection to legal authority, by poisoning their minds with notions ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 1 • Alexander Hewatt

... nor wealth nor power 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 end of time, Cast ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus

... did not tell my father, but I told nobody, even after the discovery of Spencer's charred body in the closet so miraculously preserved. With every day that passed, it became harder to part with this baleful secret. I felt it corroding my thoughts and destroying my spirits, and yet I kept still. Only my taste for modelling was gone. I ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green

... 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 ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle

... forehead charged with baleful thoughts and dreams, The household bunch of keys, the housewife's gown, Voluminous indented, and yet rigid As though a shell of burnished metal frigid, Her feet thick-shod ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

... crape-shrouded statue of Strasburg on the Place de la Concorde. About him had gathered a group of extremely sinister French of the Belleville type. They had recognised him, and their lurid upward glances at the massive form on the great war-horse were charged with baleful meaning. Bismarck once or twice looked down on them with a grim smile under his moustache. At length the most daring of the "patriots" emitted a tentative hiss. With a little polite wave of his gloved hand Bismarck bent over ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes

... its baleful spell, for we also know how the expert whom the Paternostros carried with them to Paris, was drowned just as the homeward-bound ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk

... not even a ripple upon its steaming surface. Here the haze hung as it always hung, and the cavern was belching forth deep mists, like the breathing of some prehistoric monster. He glanced up at the birdless rock above, and into the broken outlines of it he read the distorted features of some baleful, living creature, or some savage idol. But there was no answer here to the questions of his mind, any more than there had been on the rest of the plateau, so he rode on along the edge ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum

... first, reserved, quiet, uncomplaining, forming no intimate friendships, yet performing her nightly work with constantly augmenting power. Winston, ever observing her with increasing interest, imagined that the strain of such a life was telling upon her health, exhibiting its baleful effect in the whitening of her cheeks, in those darker shadows forming beneath her eyes, as well as in a shade less of animation in her manner. Yet he saw comparatively little of her, his own work proving sufficiently onerous; the quick jumps from town to town leaving ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish

... gifts and graces, he would catch 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 ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)

... strange fatality General Pope was allowed to struggle on alone against an army twice the size of the Federal force, has not been satisfactorily explained. One is almost tempted to believe, with astrologists, that baleful stars sometimes preside with malign influence over the destinies of battles, as they are said to do ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens

... teacher, Thus foreshadow things to come, When the girl shall grow the creature Of false terrors vain and dumb, And entrust their baleful fetish with ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope

... at the dead dogs, the justice sat in his saddle, and from beneath his huge moustache he spat a volley of most un-magisterial oaths, delivered in a snarling, nasal tone foreign to the ears of his listeners. A minute or so he remained thus, then his baleful eyes met the steady, meaning stare of the motionless quartette and his face changed to a blank, irresolute expression. He made a motion of urging his horse forward, then, checking it abruptly, he wheeled about, loping ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall

... were a brighter black, and in them flamed ruby lights: pitiless, mocking, cold. Plainly to be read in those sinister depths were the untold wisdom of unthinkable age, sheer ruthlessness, mighty power, and ferocity unrelieved. His baleful gaze swept from one member of the party to another, and to meet the glare of those eyes was to receive a tangible physical blow—it was actually ponderable force; that of embodied hardness and of ruthlessness incarnate, generated in that merciless ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith

... bliss' goal we gain not access, if sorrow has been tasted not; Yea, with Alastu's pact was coupled the sentence of our baleful lot. ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous

... curiosity concerning him would pretty soon have died away; nor could any amount of unwise desire to satisfy that feeling in fellow-creatures less seriously disposed have sustained him alive, in those baleful Historic Acherons and Stygian Fens, where he has had to dig and to fish so long, far away from the upper light!—Let me request all readers to blow that sorry chaff entirely out of their minds; and to believe nothing on the subject except what ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle

... revenue. But the mass of the People, at that time still freshly remembered the terrible commercial disasters and industrial depressions which had befallen the Land, through the practical operation of that baleful Democratic Free-Trade doctrine, before the Rebellion broke out, and sharply contrasted the misery and poverty and despair of those dark days of ruin and desolation, with the comfort and prosperity and hopefulness ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan

... had played directly into the hands of the radicals, led by Ben Wade in the Senate and Thaddeus Stevens in the House. Prior to that baleful night they had fallen behind the marching van. The mad act of Booth put them upon their feet and brought them to the front. They were implacable men, politicians equally of resolution and ability. Events quickly succeeding favored them and their plans. It was not alone Johnson's ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson

... 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 circumstances, and by the grace of God assisting ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady

... been historical characters afterwards elevated into deities. It was this theological element in his book which made him famous. This theory of the historical origin of the gods is even to-day called Euhemerism, and has exerted a baleful influence over writers on mythology from its author's day down to our own. These then were the doctrines which Ennius presented to the Romans in their own tongue, and it is pathetic to realise that his Sacred History formed the first formal treatise on theology ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter

... that day's exploits served to disperse the cloud of gloom that had for a moment overspread the countenance of the prince. The queen alone, leaning on the table with fixed eyes and lips that never moved, sat at this strange feast pale and cold as a baleful ghost summoned from the tomb to disturb the joy of the party. Andre, whose brain began to be affected by the draughts of wine from Capri and Syracuse, was annoyed at his wife's look, and attributing it to contempt, filled a goblet to the brim and presented ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... Vibhishan answered, "one Whose face is as the morning sun, Preeminent for hugest frame? Akampan(962) is the giant's name. Behold that chieftain, chariot-borne, Whom Brahma's chosen gifts adorn. He wields a bow like Indra's own; A lion on his flag is shown, His eyes with baleful fire are lit: 'Tis Ravan's son, 'tis Indrajit. There, brandishing in mighty hands His huge bow, Atikaya stands. And that proud warrior o'er whose head A moon-bright canopy is spread: Whose might, in many a battle tried, Has tamed imperial Indra's pride; Who ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI

... ceremonies and regulations as conduce to order and general edification. In short it grieves me to think that the Heads of the most Apostolical Church in Christendom should have insisted on three or four trifles, the abolition of which could have given offence to none but such as from the baleful superstition that alone could attach importance to them effectually, it was charity to offend;-when all the rest of Baxter's objections might ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... 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 ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini

... produced by this news was immediate. Many of the men sprang forward, officiously, to offer their services, either from the hope of the reward, or from that cringing subserviency which is one of the most baleful effects of slavery. Some ran one way, and some another. Some were for getting flambeaux of pine-knots. Some were uncoupling the dogs, whose hoarse, savage bay added not a little to ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... shoulders. His eyes are gleaming with infernal malice—it is the most diabolic 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 ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker

... them to move off; and, indeed, scarcely anything could be more ludicrous than the utter prostration of all manly feeling upon the part of the chief offender. On separating, the same baleful and pallid glances were exchanged between the brothers, who clearly possessed an instinctive community of feeling upon the chief incident of the night—we mean that of finding M'Clutchy in their sister's bedroom. ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton

... conceive, to be the most baleful conclusion which is drawn from this history. And could it be made to appear that such was David's state, for so long a term, we see no way to avoid the conclusion—see not but the idea which the scriptures give of religion as a holy principle, ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee

... Down sank the baleful crimson sun, The northern light came out, And glared upon the ice-bound ships, And shook its ...
— Successful Recitations • Various

... predecessors. Suspected persons were naturally marked out by Mr. Stirn, and reported to his employer, who, too proud or too pained to charge them openly with ingratitude, at first only passed them by in his walks with a silent and stiff inclination of his head; and afterwards gradually yielding to the baleful influence of Stirn, the Squire grumbled forth that "he did not see why he should be always putting himself out of his way to show kindness to those who made such a return. There ought to be a difference between the good and the bad." Encouraged by this admission, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various

... last autumn in the money markets, when half a dozen men, in order to obtain control of certain railways, entered into a conspiracy that came near wrecking the entire industrial and commercial interests of the country, having shed a lurid light upon the enormous and baleful power which the corporate control of the railways places in the hands of what Theodore Roosevelt aptly termed "the dangerous wealthy classes," has had the effect of converting to the advocacy of national ownership not only the writer but vast numbers ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various

... startled out of them, 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 girl's imagination during her feverish slumbers. Towards morning she ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... 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 ...
— The Present Picture of New South Wales (1811) • David Dickinson Mann

... as he studied them and strained his eyes to make out details, he caught the baleful gleam of other cubes like the first he had seen. The aircars, it seemed, were either sentinels, at the lip of the crater, or were the dwelling places of sentinels—and ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various

... thee, [O Ra, as thou] advancest, and thou restest there wherein are the offerings made to thee [As thou] advancest, [as thou] advancest toward the House the advance which thou hast made toward the House is a prosperous advance; let not any baleful obstacle proceed from thy mouth against me when thou workest on my behalf. I am Set who let loose the storm-clouds and the thunder in the horizon of heaven even as ...
— Egyptian Literature

... at the words, the one beside her became absolutely livid with rage. Mrs. Bailey had once been a beauty, and the black eyes that now glowed with baleful fire, had, in years gone by, glanced languishingly upon scores of admiring swains. But there was now nothing left of fortune, fair looks, or friends, but a bitter memory that rankled in the woman's heart. Realizing that her own ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock

... 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

... villa not 'gainst the southern breeze is pitted nor the western wind nor cruel Boreas nor sunny east, but sesterces fifteen thousand two hundred oppose it. O horrible and baleful draught. ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus

... not why, Kate sought her mother. But that good lady was already in attendance on the patient, and Kate hurried past that baleful centre of attraction with a feeling of loneliness and strangeness she had never experienced before. Entering her own room she went to the window—that first and last refuge of the troubled mind—and gazed out. Turning her eyes ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte

... clear when we come to a right understanding of the baleful motive which inspired these men. I have already said that I was not long in discovering it. There was only one possible method of doing so—and that was, by all means, by any means, to find out some condition or other common ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel

... said Jefferson Hope, who had risen from his seat. His face might have been chiselled out of marble, so hard and set was its expression, while its eyes glowed with a baleful light. ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle

... times, and by the abolition of slavery. As this legislation brought me into public life, I wish to justify my statement by the public records, with all charity to the authors of the measures who no doubt did not anticipate the baleful events that would spring from them, nor the expanded and strengthened republic which was the final result. "Man ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman

... way home from church in the morning we were talking about the good times children have on their little picnics, and Mr. Bradley said he never enjoyed a picnic in his life, because every one he had ever gone to was ruined by the baleful ...
— Paste Jewels • John Kendrick Bangs

... all power to grapple with great subjects was lost irrevocably! How many are the instances in the world's history of great minds debased and ruined by alcohol! Look back and around you at the lives of the brightest literary geniuses and see how many are under the spell of this Circe's baleful power! Think of the rich intelligences whose brightness has prematurely faded and died away in the darkness of alcoholic night! What hopes has alcohol destroyed! What resolves it has broken! What promises ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson

... both to religion and the Church, renders it impossible that it should be allowed to pursue its unmolested course, without correspondent efforts, on the part of sound Churchmen, to counteract its baleful influence. ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull

... people came to recognize that the ideal of a world of equal welfare, which had been represented to them by the clergy as a dangerous delusion, was no other than the very dream of Christ; when they realized that the hope which led on the advocates of the new order was no baleful ignis fatuus, as the churches had taught, but nothing less nor other than the Star of Bethlehem, it is not to be wondered at that the impulse which the revolutionary movement received should have been overwhelming. From that time on it assumes ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy

... string, which he then hid in a well. So the prophet fell ill, and nobody knows what might have happened if the archangel Gabriel had not opportunely revealed to the holy man the place where the knotted cord was concealed. The trusty Ali soon fetched the baleful thing from the well; and the prophet recited over it certain charms, which were specially revealed to him for the purpose. At every verse of the charms a knot untied itself, and the ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... relatives, either 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 absurd ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson

... 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 ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland

... 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 ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... carriages, and noted down the number. It was now dark, with the thin crescent of the moon hanging in the western sky throwing a weird half-light on the shining metals. The rear lamps of the train disappeared around a curve, and the signal stood at baleful red again. The black magic of the lonesome night in that strange place impressed me, but the detective was a most practical man. He placed his back against the signal-post, and paced up the line with even strides, counting his steps. I walked along the permanent way beside him silently. At ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr

... somehow failed him under the baleful stare of the other's eyes. And turning back to the milk he fell ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum

... 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, their lives remain ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... Dick. "It seems that the niggers have had it handed down to them that Sasassa Valley is haunted by a frightful fiend. Hunters and wanderers passing down the defile have seen its glowing eyes under the shadows of the cliff; and the story goes that whoever has chanced to encounter that baleful glare has had his after-life blighted by the malignant power of this creature. Whether that be true or not," continued Dick, ruefully, "I may have an opportunity ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various

... was quite unable to suppress escaped me, and the creature turned on the instant and stared at me with baleful eyes. I could have dropped on the spot, for the strength all ran out of my body with a rush. Something about it touched in me the living terror that grips and paralyses. If the mind requires but the tenth of a second to form an impression, I must have stood there ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood

... an hour or so and then woke up to the contemplation of Miriam's hunched back and the riddle of life, and this bright attractive idea of ending for ever and ever and ever all the things that were locking him in, this bright idea that shone like a baleful star above all the reek and ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells

... may have been conscious, from time to time, of a mysterious glow—now baleful, now rather cheerful, like the light from the tap-room of an inn—which has illuminated the horizon of the narrative. It appeared in certain allusions found in Mr. Alvord's conversation with Mr. Amidon during the episode of the Wrong House, and so terrified ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick

... banks of the swirling torrent, and again crashing through the darkened forest, using our axes energetically. More than once, in the stiller waters between the curves, huge crocodiles were seen disporting themselves cumbrously, and when we approached they fixed their baleful eyes on us, and came steadily on until the Captain stopped their leader by a well-directed bullet. The crocodiles of this region seemed extremely ferocious, and no sooner had one of their number been rendered hors de combat than the horrible ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various

... 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

... maister, and gan tell Their bootelesse paines, and ill succeeding night: Who all in rage to see his skilfull might Deluded so, gan threaten hellish paine 15 And sad Proserpines wrath, them to affright. But when he saw his threatning was but vaine, He cast about, and searcht his baleful ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser

... to Wes. Her chief characteristic was her devotion to Dinkey. She worshiped Dinkey, and seconded her enthusiastically. Without near the originality of Dinkey, she was yet a very good and sure pack-horse. The deceiving part about Jenny was her eye. It was baleful with the spirit of evil,—snaky and black, and with green sideways gleams in it. Catching the flash of it, you would forever after avoid getting in range of her heels or teeth. But it was all a delusion. Jenny's disposition ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White

... would never dream that this Book treated of him at all. A pale sickly shadow in torn surplice is presented to us here; weltering bewildered amid heaps of what you call 'Hebrew Old-clothes;' wrestling, with impotent impetuosity, to free itself from the baleful imbroglio, as if that had been its one function in life: who in this miserable figure would recognize the brilliant, beautiful and cheerful John Sterling, with his ever-flowing wealth of ideas, fancies, ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle

... thy baleful power Hath sunk the hopes of Persia! Bitter fruit My son hath tasted from his purposed vengeance On Athens, famed for arms; the fatal field Of Marathon, red with barbaric blood, Sufficed not: that defeat he thought to avenge, And pulled this hideous ruin on his head! Ah me! what sorrows for ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson

... over with, and after some formal speeches, resembling those 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, ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street

... its wearer dead. Nor may the woven mail After the chieftain's death wide with a champion rove. Gone is the joy of harp, gone is the music's mirth. Now the hawk goodly-winged hovers not through the hall, Nor the swift-footed mare tramples the castle court: Baleful death far has sent all living tribes ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt

... once the ring of rapid hoofs Came sudden in the night, And on the Blue Ridge summits flashed The camp-fire's baleful light. Young Nick was in the saddle, With half the valley men, To find that old man's fighting sons Who kept the ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend

... eye brightened into baleful flame, but she met it calmly. An indomitable spirit confronted one equally indomitable, and his was the first to succumb. Turning from her, Hazen took out pencil and paper from his pocket, and, crossing to the window with that same peculiar and oscillating motion ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green

... quickly to where lay Siegfried's warriors from the Nibelung land, and with his baleful tidings stole their joy. They could scarce believe it, till they heard the weeping. Right soon the messenger came to where the king did lie. Siegmund, the lord, was not asleep. I trow his heart did tell him what had happed. Never again might he see ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown

... "some he kills with his sting, some with his long folds, some breathed upon by the venom of his baleful poison." ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly

... scenes in which the king hands 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 and evil spirits. ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... usual interval 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 ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte

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

... 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 so I pictured her as I clung to the balustrade above, ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green



Words linked to "Baleful" :   sinister, maleficent, baneful, forbidding, menacing



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