What is "doleful"

Usage examples of "doleful".

I may say with truth that, as I came forth from that horrible and doleful place, my spirit remained there.

I felt as if I could not bear another four weeks of such a doleful exile.

And the litter was again followed by the Dogaressa and all the other court mourners, now on foot, and by bands of musicians playing doleful slow music, and contingents from the flagellant brotherhoods lethargically pretending to whip themselves, and finally by every other Venetian not too young or old or crippled to walk.

The monk wrote me a doleful letter, in which he confessed he had given me a piece of bad advice, adding that I was wrong to follow it.

On the eve of an especial fast of the Romish Church, while the bell tolled dismally, and the priests were chanting a doleful stave, a band of New England rangers rushed from the surrounding woods.

They laughed and joked, and when supper was over, the dishes washed, and the lamps lighted, they gathered in the old-fashioned parlor, and Betty played on a melodeon that gave forth rather doleful sounds.

We sunk into silence: a silence that drank in the doleful accounts and prognostications of our guest.

He and his fellows sound the sackbut, whose notes are more doleful than the notes of other music are.

When I got to chambers the next morning I found Miss Phyllida Trant in my room, her glasses off, her eyes red and her voice exceedingly doleful.

Will Cary, was by this time sitting up, standing much in need of a handkerchief, and looking about him, having been unhelmed, in a confused and doleful manner.

It was a wild, forsaken road, now winding through dreary pine barrens, where the wind whispered mournfully, and now over log causeways, through long cypress swamps, the doleful trees rising out of the slimy, spongy ground, hung with long wreaths of funeral black moss, while ever and anon the loathsome form of the mocassin snake might be seen sliding among broken stumps and shattered branches that lay here and there, rotting in the water.

The motel office smelled of curry and pomade, and the Punjabi children, a boy and a girl, watched him with cavernous, doleful gazes.

When the company saw their figures and doleful expressions, the laughter became general.

They accompanied on guzlas, on castanets, on tambourines, and sang the old airs, doleful and languorous, or excitable and breathiess as the flight of the earliest nomads in the beginnings of the world.

Neither of the royal personages altered position or even bothered to look around when the sweaty, dusty men in their heavy jackboots tramped up behind them to a jingle and clank of weapons and equipment, so Bass deliberately paced around the couch to take his stand between them and the still-singing girl, whose small, heart-shaped face had brightened at the sight of him, despite the sad words she still sang and the doleful notes her hands extracted from the small harp.