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Baleful   /bˈeɪlfəl/   Listen
Baleful

adjective
1.
Deadly or sinister.  Synonym: baneful.
2.
Threatening or foreshadowing evil or tragic developments.  Synonyms: forbidding, menacing, minacious, minatory, ominous, sinister, threatening.  "Forbidding thunderclouds" , "His tone became menacing" , "Ominous rumblings of discontent" , "Sinister storm clouds" , "A sinister smile" , "His threatening behavior" , "Ugly black clouds" , "The situation became ugly"



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"Baleful" Quotes from Famous Books



... the human heart, he will banish from his code all laws such as the unnatural monster of primogeniture, such as encourage associations against labour in the form of corporate bodies, and indeed all that monopolising system of legislation, whose baleful influence is shown in the depopulation of the country and in the necessity which reduces the sad relicks to owe their very existence to the ostentatious bounty of their oppressors. If it is true in common life, it is still more true in governments, that we should be just before we ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... look around a room not yet dimmed by cigar smoke. I got the most baleful glare, I thought. He didn't need to worry. I'd been certified Normal by an ...
— Card Trick • Walter Bupp AKA Randall Garrett

... last signals of the dying fires: tree-trunks upraised like smouldering torches, the timbers of the falling buildings tumbling from their props and sending up showers of sparks. A pale sliver of new moon made the red of the fires even more baleful, and the two who rode together looked back and felt the obsession of something they had ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day

... accurate principles of administration, and these cannot too speedily be adopted. The settlement of accounts is the first step, but it is necessary not only that this settlement be speedy but that it be final; for, if it be not final, the disputes on that subject will have the same baleful influence with those now subsisting. Disunion among the States must follow in the event. Disgust must take place in the moment. The same opprobrious indolence will continue, and in the meantime it is to little purpose, that our country abounds in men and ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. XI • Various

... size, threatening to choke her, to crush all the spring and youth out of her. If Tussie got well she was going to break his heart; if Tussie died it would be her fault. No one but herself was responsible for his illness, her own selfish, hateful self. Yes, she was a poisonous weed; a baleful, fatal thing, not fit for great undertakings, not fit for a noble life, too foolish to depart successfully from the lines laid down for her by other people; wickedly careless; shamefully shortsighted; spoiling, ruining, everything ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim

... your baleful schemes. Wallow in slaughter. Roll in blood. Devastate the district. As an honest hard-working Englishman I regard you ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 24, 1920 • Various

... all hours and places, and thereby produces the suspicion which he is endeavoring to avert. The relation develops with inevitable logic toward an awful crisis. This is brought about by a mere trifle. John Kurt, failing to humble his wife, strikes her. The baleful forces that lurk in the depths of the Kurt temperament rise to the surface; the whole terrible heritage of savagery overwhelms the feeble civilization which the last scion has acquired. If Thomasine had ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... 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 ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... a little surprised that Miss JOAN VIVIAN-REES should so overplay her Trixie. Her work is certainly in general not like that, and I conjecture the influence of some baleful autocrat of a producer. It seemed to me that Miss MILDRED EVELYN'S Milly was, all things considered, a capable and consistent study of a desperately unsympathetic character, a more difficult and creditable ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 25th, 1920 • Various

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

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

... the 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 revealed ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz

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

... 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 sprouted from the shoulders ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm

... heaven they exalted, and his father he knew not.[4] 6 The Fire-god on high, the supreme, the first-born, the mighty, the divider of the supreme crown of Anu! 7 The Fire-god the light that exalts him with himself he exalts. 8 Baleful (are) those seven, destroyers. 9 For his ministers in his dwelling he chooses (them). 10 O Fire-god, those seven how were they born, how grew they up? 11 Those seven in the mountain of the sunset were born. 12 Those seven in the mountain of the sunrise grew up. 13 In the hollows of the earth ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous

... in forty-eight 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 light ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson

... lofty chain of mountains, but they were soon at the end of it, and came out into the open air. But an obstacle opposed itself. A huge dragon, Ladon the terrible, reared up his hundred heads, his eyes flashing fire and fury, his mouths emitting baleful flames and pestilential breath, his tail, covered with metallic scales of green, scarlet, and blue, coiling away to a great distance. The page drew his sword; but the knight took a little black book and aimed it at the volcanic heads. ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins

... and erratic to a degree. "Too muchy moon-devil," according to Li Ho. That very afternoon he had met them coming down from their talk upon the rocks and the ironic courtesy of his greeting had been little less than baleful. At supper he had remarked sentimentally upon the flight of time, referring to the nearness of Friday in a way eminently calculated ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay

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

... 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

... sad bosom, a tumultuous world Of hopes and fears on his dear mem'ry spread; For fate had not the clouded roll unfurl'd, Nor yet with baleful hemlock ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent

... Lodi, retreats of Moscow, Waterloos, 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 ...
— The French Revolution • 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! ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson

... rude log cabin a fire burned low, lightening the forms of the two border outlaws, and showing in the background the dark forms of Indians sitting motionless on the floor. Their dusky eyes emitted a baleful glint, seemingly a reflection of their savage souls caught by the firelight. Legget wore a look of ferocity and sullen fear strangely blended. Brandt's face was hard and haggard, his lips set, his gray ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey

... above his pillow, but with a transformed face. The eyes that were for the moment turned toward the door burned with a baleful hatred and the lips were drawn into a ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck

... no freyke that there would fly, But stiffly in stour did stand, Echone hewing on other while they might dry, With many a baleful brand. ...
— The Book of Old English Ballads • George Wharton Edwards

... generations were cold and holy as the 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 out of harm's way, the valiant ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville

... a sinful notion Conceived of foreign powers Has come across the ocean To harm this land of ours; And heresies called fashions Have modesty effaced, And baleful, morbid passions Corrupt our native taste. O tempora! O mores! What profanations these That seek to dim the glories Of apple-pie ...
— A Little Book of Western Verse • Eugene Field

... terror into which his own experiments had thrown him. He had unwittingly accumulated, and had accidentally discharged, and had, for the first time in human experience, felt something of the shock the modern lineman dreads because it means death. He had toiled until he held the baleful genie in a glass vessel partially filled with water, and the sprite could not be seen. Accidentally he made a connection between the two surfaces of the jar, and declared that he did not recover from the experience for two days, and that nothing could induce ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele

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

... till night, and oppressed him far into his sleep. He could not give his trouble certain shape; what was mostly with him was a formless loss, which he could not resolve into any definite shame or wrong. At times, what he had seen seemed to him some baleful trick of the imagination, some lurid and ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells

... 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 Year of Jubilee • George Gissing

... night. The monstrous ditch of Clamart opens. From it arises a miasm, a phosphorescent glow. It shines and flickers in two separate tarts; it takes shape, the head rejoins the body, it is a phantom; the phantom gazes into the darkness with wild, baleful eyes, rises, grows bigger and blue, hovers for an instant and then speeds away to the zenith to open the door of the palace of the sun where butterflies flit from flower to flower and angels flit ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo

... 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 his own brother's blood, and ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various

... a theory of colour, beginning with the greens which are at the bottom. There are good greens—the green of young elms and birches and beeches. Green may be evil too, as the lower shades of yellow may be—and certain blends of green and yellow are baleful. The greens are first to appear. They are Nature's nearest emerging—the water-colours—the green of the water-courses and the lowlands. Nature brings forth first the green and then the sun does his part. Between the rose-gold and the ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort

... conscientious in the discharge of any business, unwearying in loving patience and solicitude when those bound to him by blood or friendship were ill or in trouble, "as kind-hearted and generous a man as ever lived in the world." Yet as debts accumulated, and accommodation bills shed their baleful shadow on his life, and duns grew many and furious, he became altogether immersed in mean money troubles, and suffered the son who was to shed such lustre on his name to remain for a time without the means of learning, and to sink first into a ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials

... a heavy, ugly pout. His shaggy brows were contracted; somber, baleful flashes, that betrayed something of those passions that he was subduing, showed in his eyes as the pony skirted the timber where Randerson had tied Ruth's horse. When he reached the declivity where Ruth had overheard Chavis and Kester, he dismounted ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer

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

... on the 29th of last November, the Hon. Judge Curtis sat on the bench and determined the amount of my bail, and the same eye which had frowned with such baleful aspect on the rescuers of Shadrach, quailed down underneath my ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker

... 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 more and more ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy

... washed their hands of all responsibility for his utterances. Even now, when the sound of falling shackles is in the air, and the smoke of the torment of the oppressor fills the sky, old partisans of freedom cannot quite forget their stupid and hackneyed animosities, but still bemoan the baleful influence of this fiery itinerant. Representative of none but himself, disowned or hated by all parties, acknowledging responsibility to God and his own conscience only, he has done his work, and done it well,—done it amid careful questionings ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various

... profoundly unhappy; and chiefly by unlocking imperfect glimpses of thoughts and slumbering instincts, which it is for his peace to have entirely obscured, because for him they can be revealed only partially, and with the sad effect of throwing a baleful gleam upon his blighted condition. Do we mean, then, to compare Addison with an idiot? Not generally, by any means. Nobody can more sincerely admire him where he was a man of real genius, viz., in his delineations ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey

... said the hornet in a honey-sweet tone that was sickening. "Never mind. It'll last until it's over." He smiled a baleful smile. ...
— The Adventures of Maya the Bee • Waldemar Bonsels

... communication with all these spirits. At any rate, he became aware that the eyes of that dreadful magician were fixed upon him, and that a bone had a better chance of escaping the search of a Rontgen ray than he of hiding himself from their baleful glare. ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard

... met the fellow's baleful gaze with a cool, steady look. Tip, muttering something, edged away ...
— The High School Pitcher - Dick & Co. on the Gridley Diamond • H. Irving Hancock

... in the book, in F minor, one in which his individuality displays itself in a manner never to be forgotten. How charming, how dreamy it was! Soft as the song of a sleeping child." Schumann wrote this about the wonderful study in F minor, which whispers, not of baleful deeds in a dream, as does the last movement of the B flat minor sonata, but is—"the song of a sleeping child." No comparison could be prettier, for there is a sweet, delicate drone that sometimes issues from childish ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker

... hastened back, for I forgot to take my watch and was belated. I fear I am late, even now, for tiffin," demurely replied the Swiss maiden, dropping for the first time in her life into the baleful arts of the other daughters of Eve. She had broken the ice of propriety in which her past life had been congealed and an insidious pleasure now thrilled her quickened veins, as she felt herself possessed of a secret, one linking her to an attractive member of the dangerous sex, and a hero of romance, ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage

... from which they may be unceasingly replenished. He is like a plant cut off at the stem and stuck in the ground without any root, and consequently that spiritual blight of which George Eliot speaks creeps over him, producing weakness, perplexity, and fear, with all their baleful consequences, where there should be that strength, order, and confidence which are the very foundation of all building-up for whatever purpose, whether of personal prosperity ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward

... he found her very 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

... 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 a ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick

... midnight storms, the scene of human things Appear'd before me; deserts, burning sands, Where the parch'd adder dies; the frozen south; And desolation blasting all the west With rapine and with murder. Tyrant power Here sits enthroned in blood; the baleful charms Of superstition there infect the skies, And turn the sun to horror. Gracious Heaven! What is the life of man? Or cannot these, Not these portents thy awful will suffice? That, propagated thus beyond their scope, They rise to act their cruelties ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... Europe, without cessation, exerting a baleful influence upon temporal affairs; we see it direct the interests of princes; we see it divide and make Christian nations enemies of each other, because their spiritual guides do not all entertain the same opinions. Germany ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach

... by sight, from the evening she had spent at the old hall; more of her she knew nothing. From the mind of Tom, in his illness, her baleful influence had vanished like an evil dream, and Mary had not thought it necessary to let him know how falsely, contemptuously, and contemptibly, she had behaved toward him. Letty, therefore, had no feeling toward Sepia but one of admiration for ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald

... tobacco. I shall not in my remarks be offensively personal, because you all use it, or nearly all! I know by experience how it soothes and roseates the world, and kindles sociality, and I also know some of its baleful results. I was its slave, and by the grace of God I have become its conqueror. Tens of thousands of people have been asking the question during the past two months, asking it with great pathos and great earnestness: "Does the use of tobacco ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage

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

... 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 car manager was ...
— The Circus Boys on the Plains • Edgar B. P. Darlington

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

... 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 destin'd course, And through the kindred squadrons mow their way. Ye towers of Julius, London's lasting shame, With many a ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education

... 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, creeping thing, a sort of monstrous hedgehog, ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki

... deep, world-wise, and fluent man had now become to Hogarth like manna, or rather a vice, like opium: for in those grey eyes of the cleric was hinted anon the baleful glint of ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel

... Sava 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 institutions of Belgrade—the military ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various

... nothing more 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, ...
— Walls of Acid • Henry Hasse

... hunter. For an instant I forgot my situation. But where was I? What was I doing? Was I to return to Ghat, or perish in The Desert? My strength was failing me fast. I could not pursue for ever this wild chase at the base of the rock of the Jenoun. Under their baleful influence, I shall wander and wander till I drop and perish! I must make up my mind. The sun was not yet high up. I could walk till noon on the journey back, and then sleep a few hours and rest. The chill of the morning had taken ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson

... there for a long, aching, exquisitely silent moment, her hand in his, the great square emerald set in a wonderful filigree and scrolling of gold on her finger, the other thing gleaming with a baleful light between them. Then the spell broke with the roll of carriage wheels on the drive. A minute later, Mrs. Ozanne came into the veranda, Rosalie clinging to her arm. Harlenden was on his feet instantly, and, ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley

... 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

... obligatory for children from the beginning of the eighth to the end of the twelfth year. Such measures in behalf of general education as governments have adopted in recent times are founded, to be sure, partly on the conscious need of self-protection against ignorance and its baleful consequences to the state. A more directly humane impulse, however, mingles with this motive. The operation of benevolent feeling is seen in the multiplying of special schools for the benefit of the blind, of the deaf and ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher

... 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 turn ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy

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

... baleful than any sounds he could have uttered; it was a sort of ominous, canine silence, covering a hankering to get in a good bite if the ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day

... brigade, which had been outflanked, fell back to the town by General Wadsworth's order. Upon witnessing this retreat, which was somewhat disorderly, General Howard hastened to send a special messenger to General Meade with the baleful intelligence that the First Corps had fled from the field at the first contact with the enemy, thus magnifying a forced retreat of two regiments, acting under orders, into the flight of an entire corps, two-thirds ...
— Chancellorsville and Gettysburg - Campaigns of the Civil War - VI • Abner Doubleday

... 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

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

... officiously carrying the bicycle off into an inner room, not even granting the assembled people the harmless privilege of looking at it from a distance - for there might be some among the crowd possessed of the fenna ghuz (evil eye), and rather than have them fix their baleful gaze upon the important piece of property left under his charge by a stranger, he chivalrously braves the displeasure of his own people; smiling complacently at their shouts of disapproval, he triumphantly bears it out ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens

... 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 ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart

... a time by his fall, he lies rolling in the fiery gulf; but at length, rolling round his baleful eyes, he sees ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer

... spasmodic gusts, as though it had lost its reckoning, and 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 ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... and how his change of cheer began? 240 Or who had done the offence? But if, said he, Your grief alone is hard captivity; For love of Heaven, with patience undergo A cureless ill, since Fate will have it so: So stood our horoscope in chains to lie, And Saturn in the dungeon of the sky, Or other baleful aspect, ruled our birth, When all the friendly stars were under earth: Whate'er betides, by Destiny 'tis done; And better bear like men, than vainly seek to shun. 250 Nor of my bonds, said Palamon again, Nor of unhappy planets I complain; But when my mortal anguish caused my ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden

... for me to withstand. It is quite a peculiar case, my friend, to have a literary name. The few men of worth and consideration who offer you their intimacy on that score, and whose regard is really worth coveting, are too disagreeably counterweighed by the baleful swarm of creatures who keep humming round you, like so many flesh-flies; gape at you as if you were a monster, and condescend moreover, on the strength of one or two blotted sheets, to present themselves ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle

... with the Evil Eye. Nor is the swarthy picturesque ruffian who acts as our driver unprovided with a talisman in case of emergency, for we observe hanging from his heavy silver watch-chain the long twisted horn of pink coral, which is popularly supposed to catch the first baleful glance, and to act on the principle of a lightning-conductor, in deflecting the approaching danger from the prudent wearer of the coral trinket. Merrily to the sound of jingling bells and the deep-chested exhortations ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan

... grow 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 to every one of the victims before death. It is true ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel

... of a grace in character which is evidently God's, and whole mountains of prejudice and error melt away. We are just as much in danger of narrowing the Church in accordance with our narrowness as any 'sacramentarian' of them all. We are tempted to think that no good thing can grow up under the baleful shadow of that tree, a sacerdotal Christianity. We are tempted to think that all the good people are Dissenters, just as Churchmen are to think that nobody can be a Christian who prays without a prayer-book. Our own type of denominational character—and there ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren

... sentient beings, and in so doing have given rise to the 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, sorrow, and suffering. Consideration ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell

... 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 ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner

... 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

... than before, but still sufficient to disclose the baleful eyes and writhing arms of the squid when the boat was yet a safe distance away. One by one the arms fell back into the water, as if from exhaustion; slowly the beating of the tail subsided. After a time all sound and motion ceased. The boys waited ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various

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

... 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 ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

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

... there, she ate and drank there, she almost slept there. What she contrived to do there for so many hours and what was the irresistible spell Lady Agnes couldn't pretend she had succeeded in discovering. She spoke of this baleful resort only as "Nick's place," and spoke of it at first as little as possible. She judged highly probable, however, that Biddy would come in early that afternoon: there was something or other, some common social duty, she had condescended to promise she would perform with Grace. Poor Lady Agnes, ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James

... grave may close upon them before the day of final triumph arrive. Amongst the virtues of the good Citizen are those of fortitude and patience; and, when he has to carry on his struggle against corruptions deep and widely-rooted, he is not to expect the baleful tree to come down at a single blow; he must patiently remove the earth that props and feeds it, and sever the ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett

... whole band stopped short, mute and awe-struck; for it was no common name which he had thus announced. It was a name which already had been trumpeted over the world, and in Spain had gained a baleful renown—a name which belonged to one who was known as the right arm of Don Carlos, one who was known as the beau ideal of the Spanish character, surpassing all others in splendid audacity and merciless cruelty; lavish generosity and bitterest ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille

... disunion, and was again revived at the close of the Mexican War, and continued violently through 1849 and 1850. The year 1850 will be ever memorable in the history of the United States as a year wherein all the baleful seeds of disunion were sown, which grew, to ripen, a little more than ten years later, into disunion in fact. Prophetically, a leading South Carolina paper in ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer

... like light. But would she always be happy? There were the possibilities of the future to be reckoned with, sickness, childbirth, and the rearing of children, the hidden development of the character which so often grows away from what it once cherished, the baleful currents of outside influences, the attraction and repulsion of so-called friends and enemies all of which complicate the primitive simplicity of married life and forfeit the honeymoon Eden. Adam and Eve in the garden of the Creation can hear the ...
— Kimono • John Paris

... 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, we know he will not spring forward, but will stand there ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various

... him to 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, was fain to catch at the back of ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens

... two Sundays the Allens have absented themselves from 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

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

... spray; this tree is thine enemy; hasten where the vine rises in clustering shade of silvered leaves; on her bough rest the sole of thy foot, around her sing and pour the shrill music of thy mouth; for the oak carries mistletoe baleful to birds, and she the grape-cluster; and ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail

... to work her baleful power, Suspicion waits the sullen hour Of fretfulness and strife, When care the infirmer bosom wrings, Or Eurus waves his murky wings To damp ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside

... that I 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 ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field

... Ettarre, of Gareth and Lynette, which have received their latest and most beautiful setting at the hands of the poet-laureate Tennyson, and the very tragic and pathetic tale of the twin brothers Balin and Balan, who, after baleful happenings galore, failing to recognize each other, fight until one deals the "dolorous stroke" which kills ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber

... examples, in which birds and hounds share their lords' and ladies' secrets, and serve them staunchly in hours of peril; they belong to the times when fairies were still seen holding their moonlight revels, when witches exercised their baleful arts, and fearsome dragons wore still to be met and conquered—"and if you do not believe it," said Dr. Spence Watson, ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry

... friends of the people. They seem to mingle with them more immediately, as their counsellors and comforters; and to go among them more, when they are sick; and to pry less than some other orders, into the secrets of families, for the purpose of establishing a baleful ascendency over their weaker members; and to be influenced by a less fierce desire to make converts, and once made, to let them go to ruin, soul and body. They may be seen, in their coarse dress, in all parts of the town at all times, and begging in the markets early in the morning. ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens

... secession, once taken, can never be recalled; and all the baleful and withering consequences that must follow, will rest on the convention for all coming time. When we and our posterity shall see our lovely South desolated by the demon of war, which this act of yours will inevitably invite and call forth; when our green fields of waving harvest shall be ...
— Standard Selections • Various

... 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 Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

... 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 force ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... 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 a high key, "Tige ith ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte

... seriousness of his friend's—the printer's—objection, and for many days thereafter he was haunted by a consideration of the sufferings of this conscientious man, obliged to assist materially in disseminating the dangerous and subversive doctrines contained in this baleful fiction. What solemn protests must have been laid with the ink on the rollers and impressed upon those wicked sheets! what pious warnings must have been secretly folded and stitched in that number of "The Overland Monthly"! Across the chasm of years and distance the author stretches forth ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte

... pictures on the walls, and the frescoes in the roofs. Oftenest they did not seem persons who could bring a cultivated taste to their enjoyment, but fortunately that was not essential to it, and possibly it was even greater without that. They could not have got so much hurt from the baleful beauties of Charles's court without their history as with it, and where they might not have been protected by their ignorance, they were saved by their preoccupation with one another, for they mostly hunted the objects ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells

... fell against the wall. Her eyes were fixed upon the Lady Mary with a baleful despair, she gasped ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford

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

... Virginia resolves had given "the signal for 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 ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler

... honourable—not because she was blinded to the baseness of his nature. She loved him in spite of her knowledge of his real character—she yielded to the influence of an infatuation which she was so powerless to resist that she might almost be pardoned for believing herself the victim of a baleful destiny. ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... fumbling with the combination to the great vault in the corner, old Hector's breath came in short snorts. He turned and, still in the same attitude, watched Daney while the latter twirled and fumbled and twirled. Poor man! He knew The Laird's baleful glance was boring into his back and for the life of him he could not remember the combination he had used for ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne

... performed so many offices of alarm, though a little wrinkled now, was too valuable a stage-property to be neglected. In the hands of so skilful an operator, its slender body flutters voluminous with new folds of inexpensive cotton, and its eyes glare with the baleful terrors of unlimited tallow. Mr. Choate honestly confesses that sectional jealousies are coeval with the country itself, but it is only as fomented by Anti-slavery-extension that he finds them dreadful. When South Carolina threatened disunion unless the Tariff of the party to which Mr. Choate ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various

... guard themselves against the baleful habit of intemperance, should shun all resorts where intoxicating drinks are vended. They should avoid throwing themselves in the way of temptation. "Lead us not into temptation," should be the constant prayer of the young. When by any combination of circumstances, they find themselves in the ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin

... eyes, singing for very joy, sure they were guiding my life and that some day I would be happy, gloriously happy. Somehow, Paul, I always expected to be happy—always!—till now! Now the stars seem to mock me. I must have been born under a baleful conjunction, I guess. Oh, I told you, Paul, that Opals were unlucky. I warned you—didn't I warn you? I may have tempted you, too, but—I didn't mean to ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous

... opened the window, she perceived it even more strongly; if she went out, each breath of wind brought it to her. The people she saw—even her own Jack, when he returned at night with his blouse spotted with oil—exhaled the same baleful odor, which she fancied clung even to herself—the odor of toil—and filled her with ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet

... long, oh British citizens, will ye in patience bide The torture of the Jury-box remorselessly applied, The Usher's haughty insolence, the Bobby's baleful pride? ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss

... rich lace curtains there peered the dark face of Ela's jilted lover, Vernon Ashley, and in the glittering eyes, fixed immovably on Ela, shone a baleful, boding light enough to frighten a stranger, and much more so Olive, who knew of the cruel wrongs that had goaded ...
— Dainty's Cruel Rivals - The Fatal Birthday • Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller

... as he caught sight of it in the lamplight. The White Hope was sitting at the table in the attitude of one who has heard the gong and is anxious to begin; while Mamie, bending over him, raised her head as the two men entered and fixed Steve with a baleful stare. ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse

... of savage tribes, or behind the elaborate ceremonial of 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 classical times, the days when they had literally stoned ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland

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

... the oppressed, to save and shield the poor; Prudent in counsel, honest in debate, Patient to hear and judge, patient to wait; The calm, the wise, the witty and the proved, Whom millions honored, and whom millions loved; Swayed by no baleful lust of pride or power, The shining pageants ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various

... sloth and idleness, stood up and spake thus: "I am the great prince of listlessness and sloth, who have great influence upon millions of all sorts and conditions of men; I am that stagnant pond where the spawn of every evil is bred, where the dregs of every corruption and baleful slime grows rank. What good wouldst thou be, Asmodai, or ye, chief damned evils, were I not? I, who keep the windows open and unguarded that ye may enter into the man when ye will, through his eyes, his ears and his mouth. I will go and roll them all ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne

... have had 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. My poor little garden has suffered ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones

... crimsoned 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 youth had flown, she ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock

... his mighty sire of ante-bellum fame that stood between the plow handles all day and danced or shouted all night. The increase of zymotic diseases is admitted, but there has been a corresponding increase of power in many lines that will more than counteract this baleful growth. ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various

... repelling him as your Master was? Are you ready with the retort to every foul suggestion, "Get thee hence, Satan"? Cultivate a tender sensitiveness about sin. The finest barometers are the most sensitive. Whatever be your besetting frailty—whatever bitter or baleful passion you are conscious aspires to the mastery—watch it, crucify it, "nail it to your Lord's cross." You may despise "the day of small things"—the Great Adversary does not. He knows the power ...
— The Mind of Jesus • John R. Macduff

... 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 ...
— The Golden Fleece and the Heroes who Lived Before Achilles • Padraic Colum

... represented by the house Beautiful—'When Christian drank it was clear and good, but now it is dirty; and with the feet of some that are not desirous that pilgrims should here quench their thirst.' After the writing of the first part, and before that of the second, the Act of Uniformity had spread its baleful influence over England. To use Bunyan's words—'The Romish beasts have corrupted the doctrine by treading it down with their feet, and have muddied this water with their own dirt and filthiness.'—See ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... 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 it only in the grave! Love may die, ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun

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

... show mercy to my many ills! Never had this been done, but like a fiend Thou temptedst me with ceaseless devilish thoughts. Therefore I curse with bitterness of soul The hour wherein I saw thy baleful eyes. My eyes I curse for looking on those eyes! My ears I curse for hearkening to thy tongue! I curse thy tongue for tempting of mine ears! Each part I curse, that we call thine or mine; Thine for enticing ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various

... affected or their destiny controlled by external forces. Thus omen (a prophetic utterance or sign) and portent (a stretching forward, a foreseeing, a foretelling) might originally be either benign or baleful; but nowadays, especially in the adjectival forms ominous and portentous, they wear a menacing hue. Similarly criticism, censure, and doom, all of them signifying at first mere judgment, have come—the first in popular, the other two in universal, usage—to stand for adverse judgment. The ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... 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 ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor

... that the chest-lid would fly open and that the baleful thing lurking within would spring upon her. The torture she suffered from such anticipations was little short of hell, and was rendered all the more maddening by occasional quiverings of the lid, which brought all her expectations to a climax. Now, now at any rate, she assured herself, the moment ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell

... within into the aspect of a devil. That face, now ashy white, was distorted into a diabolical grin. The teeth glistened in the lamplight. The brows, twisted into a tense and convulsed frown, were drawn down into black shadows, through which the eyes burned a baleful green like the eyes of a wild animal driven to bay. Again he spoke in the same breathless voice. "I am John Scarfield! Look at me, then, if you want to see a pirate!" Again there was a little time of silence, through which Mainwaring heard his watch ticking loudly from ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle

... 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 ...
— Voyage of H.M.S. Pandora - Despatched to Arrest the Mutineers of the 'Bounty' in the - South Seas, 1790-1791 • Edward Edwards

... what is the purpose of Pelias? Whither is he driving forth from the Panachaean land so great a host of heroes? On one day they would waste the palace of Aeetes with baleful fire, should he not yield them the fleece of his own goodwill. But the path is not to be shunned, the toil is hard for those ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius

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

... me are precious; hear me, Theseus. 'Twas I who cast an eye of lawless passion On chaste and dutiful Hippolytus. Heav'n in my bosom kindled baleful fire, And vile Oenone's cunning did the rest. She fear'd Hippolytus, knowing my madness, Would make that passion known which he regarded With horror; so advantage of my weakness She took, and hasten'd to accuse him first. For that she has been punish'd, tho' too mildly; Seeking ...
— Phaedra • Jean Baptiste Racine

... shall be. This is your eighteenth birthday, Sybil: it is a day of fate to you; in it occurs your planetary hour—an hour of good or ill, according to your actions. I have cast your horoscope. I have watched your natal star; it is under the baleful influence of Scorpion, and fiery Saturn sheds his lurid glance upon it. Let me see your hand. The line of life is drawn out distinct and clear—it runs—ha! what means that intersection? Beware—beware, my Sybil. Act as I ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth

... cause, which from the first had exercised a most baleful influence upon the arts and upon literature in Rome, had by this time matured its disastrous tendencies towards the extinction of the moral sensibilities. This was the circus, and the whole machinery, ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey

... calmness, he felt that his first duty was to remove the coin from their possession. But how was it to be done? He could not disclose his knowledge of its baleful properties. It would be set down as the vagary of a disordered brain; nobody would entertain it for an instant. His object must be accomplished, if at ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various

... have been nothing except for the baleful effects of that party," answered the doctor, whose thought could not dissever itself from the unhappy consequences which had followed the carousal (is the word too strong?) at Mr. Birtwell's. "If I had not been betrayed into drinking wine enough to disturb seriously my nervous system and leave it ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur

... 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 ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose

... himself, his phrases, his turn of speech! With all that wealth behind him how had he been allowed to grow up like this? No, her notion was unreasonable, almost impossible. Although dismissed, it hung about her mental presentment of him, however, like a rather baleful aura, not without fascination to a seventeen-year-old imagination. So busy was she with her fabrications that several miles of road slipped by unnoticed. There came a strange confusion in her thoughts. ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt

... had ever beheld. Hector I was convinced would lose his election; and, what was more valuable, his health. I saw prognostics which I thought could not be mistaken; and which afterward proved as baleful as I then imagined them to be. Whether the contest might not ruin the family was more than I knew; and what the effect might be on Olivia, and even on our hoped for union, ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft

... ostrich dare not dust her wings Anear this Presence. The long caravan's Dazed camels stop, and mute the Bedouins stare. This symbol of past power more than man's Presages doom. Kings look—and Kings despair: Their sceptres tremble in their jewelled hands And dark thrones totter in the baleful air! ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various

... both advanced to the middle of the stage. The countenance of the black, and his huge chest, resembled rather a colossal statue of bronze, than the bust of a human being. His eye gleamed at Lamh Laudher with baleful flashes of intense hatred. The spectators saw, however, that the dimensions of Lamh Laudher gained considerably by his approximation to the black. The dusky color of the Boxer added apparently to his size, whilst the healthful light which lay upon the figure ...
— The Dead Boxer - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton

... 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, Stirn had conducted himself towards ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various

... somber and awful background. While this had been going on a boy had been murdered in the vicinity of Lawrence. Some young men rode out to see about it, and one of them was shot and killed. But a still more ghastly crime threw its baleful shadow over the people. It was perpetrated two days before the Governor concluded ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler

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

... eastern sky there rode the disc of a full moon, but it was a moon weirdly different from any that Dixon had ever seen before. This moon was a deep and baleful green; was glowing with a stark malignant fire like that which lurks in the blazing heart of a giant emerald! Bathed in the glow of the intense green rays, the desolate mountain landscape shone with a new and ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various

... 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

... 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 useless ore? Seen all her triumphs but destruction haste, Like flaring ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith

... this is to give over the market for goods of any one kind to a few establishments which are enormously large and on something like a uniform plane of efficiency. Then the organizing tendency takes a baleful cast as the creator of "trusts" and the extinguisher of ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark

... hushing its music and darkening its sunshine. A sense of dread oppressed her. There came into her soul an intuitive feeling that somehow his coming was fraught with danger. When not peering around she would often catch his eyes bent on her with a baleful expression. ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper

... witnesses before the face of the blessed gods and mortal men, yea and of him, that king untoward, against the day when there cometh need of me hereafter to save them all from shameful wreck. Of a truth he raveth with baleful mind, and hath not knowledge to look before and after, that so his Achaians might battle in ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)

... should be actually a power of evil, dangerous to humanity. And yet, why not? Why should there not appear sometimes from the secret reservoirs of Being, powerful and fatal influences that, in the long result, are definitely baleful and malign in their effect upon the fortunes of ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys

... plucked, upstarted sheer As phantom from the pane thereby A corpse-like countenance, with eye That iced me by its baleful peer - Silent, as from a bier ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy

... dead dogs conspire The flesh to torture and the soul to fire— Where all the "well defined and several stinks" Known to mankind hold revel and high jinks— Humbled in spirit, smitten with a sense Of lost distinction, leveled eminence, She suddenly resigns her baleful trust, Nor ever lays again our mortal dust. Her powers atrophied, her vigor sunk, She lives deodorized, a ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce

... maltreat, abuse; ill-use, ill-treat; buffet, bruise, scratch, maul; smite &c (scourge) 972; do violence, do harm, do a mischief; stab, pierce, outrage. do mischief, make mischief; bring into trouble. destroy &c 162. Adj. hurtful, harmful, scathful^, baneful, baleful; injurious, deleterious, detrimental, noxious, pernicious, mischievous, full of mischief, mischief-making, malefic, malignant, nocuous, noisome; prejudicial; disserviceable^, disadvantageous; wide-wasting. unlucky, sinister; obnoxious; untoward, disastrous. oppressive, burdensome, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... cottage near Vienna Haydn was the centre of a brilliant society. Princes and nobles were proud to do honor to him; and painters, poets, scholars, and musicians made a delightful coterie, which was not even disturbed by the political convulsions of the time. The baleful star of Napoleon shot its disturbing influences throughout Europe, and the roar of his cannon shook the established order of things with the echoes of what was to come. Haydn was passionately attached to his country ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris

... until Doris' cheeks were like roses and she was all out of breath. At last she accomplished the baleful ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas



Words linked to "Baleful" :   alarming, maleficent



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