What is "propitious"

Usage examples of "propitious".

In order to render the king of Poland, elector of Saxony, propitious to this design, he was accommodated with the loan of a very considerable sum, upon the mortgage of certain bailiwicks and lordships belonging to the Saxon dominions.

The Swedish monarch was rendered propitious to the project by assurances that the house of Hesse-Cassel, of which he was the head, should be elevated into an electorate.

The reign of Queen Anne was propitious to the fortunes of Swift and Pope, who lived in all the happy pride of independence.

Despite the excitability of his nature, which often led to outbursts of hysteria, he had the patience to wait and the shrewdness to realize that the climate of material prosperity and of a feeling of relaxation which settled over Germany in those years was not propitious for his purposes.

During the heat of the day we rested in this pleasant grove, and with sleep and conversation passed the hours away, while the sentries pacing to and fro alone disturbed the illusion that this was some picnic party in a more propitious land.

CHAPTER XV: THE WORK OF THE CAVALRY The negotiations of the Mamunds had this time opened under more propitious circumstances.

When, at an earlier period, I refrained from discussing the question of frontier policy, I declared that its consideration was only postponed until a more propitious moment.

And within, Circe, standing by the hearth, kept burning atonement-cakes without wine, praying the while that she might stay from their wrath the terrible Furies, and that Zeus himself might be propitious and gentle to them both, whether with hands stained by the blood of a stranger or, as kinsfolk, by the blood of a kinsman, they should implore his grace.

No wonder then, blessed shade, that now, when reunited to thy native heaven, thou art still kind, propitious, and beneficent to us, who groan in this inhospitable vale of sorrow thou hast left.

Don Diego will pardon these clandestine measures, which we took, from a full persuasion that it was impossible to render him propitious to the views in which our hearts and hands were so deeply interested.

At the hour which the astrologers had told Julius was propitious, three in the afternoon, the covering was removed from the statue.

And as he refused to obey she waved her crop threateningly and at a propitious moment banged the door upon his impertinent snub-nose.

We might be enjoined by our fictions to assume a spurious continuity from one pocket universe to the next, to see but one of the infinite faces of each moment, but there are propitious moments when it is possible to see through the fictions and attain, if only for that moment, a vision of things as they are.

If a Will unfavourable to Cedric had been made public, that bottle would have been replaced and the other kept for a more propitious occasion.

The first few days of the voyage passed prosperously, amid favourable weather and propitious winds, and they soon came in sight of the great Andaman, the principal of the islands in the Bay of Bengal, with its picturesque Saddle Peak, two thousand four hundred feet high, looming above the waters.