C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Midnight
About the noon of night.
In the dead vast and middle of the night.
Hushed as midnight silence.
That hour, of night’s black arch the keystone.
Now had night measured, with her shadowy cone, half-way up hill this vast sublunar vault.
Midnight brought on the dusky hour friendliest to sleep and silence.
Midnight,—strange mystic hour,—when the veil between the frail present and the eternal future grows thin.
This dead of midnight is the noon of thought, and wisdom mounts her zenith with the stars.
It is now the very witching time of night; when churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out contagion to this world: now could I drink hot blood, and do such business as the bitter day would quake to look on.
The night, proceeding on with silent pace, stood in her noon, and viewed with equal face her sleepy rise and her declining race.
The stifled hum of midnight, when traffic has lain down to rest, and the chariot, wheels of Vanity, still rolling here and there through distant streets are bearing her to halls roofed in and lighted to the due pitch for her; and only vice and misery, to prowl or to moan like night birds, are abroad.