desolating

Causing anguish and despair.

So when Mary's whole nature rose to meet this word of Jesus, and threw itself into the consent she gave, and turned her forcibly as it weer from Jesus to John, it was as if the whole anguish of the Crucifixion gained a new life, a fresh activity, a more potent bitterness, a more desolating power.

Since falling in love with Brake, and since their separation, these evening hours had become even more desolating, particularly since Grace knew he was somewhere in the house, pacing the library or the drawing room and talking about the things which interested not only him but her too, the unending fascination of colour, of trying to reshape nature, of seeing with the heart, while she sat trapped in a room under the roof mending the children's clothes and half-listening yet again to Dora's ill-determined plans to escape somehow from her servitude to find fame in the music halls.

Destructive; ruinous.

Why, that it was the cause of Pure Democracy which we were thus called on to support; of universal suffrage, Jacobin clubs, and a furious press; of revolutionary confiscation, democratic anarchy, and unbridled injustice; of the most desolating of tyrannies, the most ruinous of despotisms.

In the reign of Henry VI. commenced one of the most desolating of wars — the War of the Roses.