Definition of "woful"

Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched / With a woful agony, / Which forced me to begin my tale; / And then it left me free.

1798, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Still less has it the dreary moan, the cry as of one in pain, which is borne on a November blast; but it has a music of its own—sad, low, and plaintive, like the last echoes of a forsaken lute—a voice of weeping, but tender and subdued, like the pleasant tears shed over some woful romance of the olden time, telling some mournful chance of the young knight falling in his first battle, or of a maiden pale and perishing with ill-requited love.

1834, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], chapter XI, in Francesca Carrara. […], volume III, London: Richard Bentley, […], (successor to Henry Colburn), page 81