Midnight

“ The evening light, in our country hanging dubiously between the glare of noon and the darkness of midnight, invites to that condition of mind which lies between the intense alertness of day and the deep oblivion of sleep, and which seems the most favourable for the meditation of divine things. ”

“ May oft be moistened by thy tears.
The midnight tasks that hold from sleep
Teach us to garner as we reap.
The ticking clock on yonder wall,
The drooping lids as swift hours call!
The morning brings the rising sun ”

“ The general aspect of midnight is calm and solemn; the lulled spirits unconsciously are subdued by the deep repose. Not so this night. The keen air from the water made exercise necessary to circulate the blood; and somewhat of cheerful exertion is connected with a fresh gale and a quick walk. ”

“ Midnight showed keen interest in this new world. It was a white world, a silent world of snow and green spruce. The biting cold made him plunge through the deep drifts and snort eagerly. One other dweller of the high country, who could not sleep through the cold months, came to the meadow. An old timber-line buck had chosen to stay in the high mesa country defying the cold and the snow. ”

“ It was now midnight—that time when the feelings are the acutest, the nerves most easily excited; when the thoughts strive to wander o’er the regions of boundless space to search out things mysterious and inscrutable; when the spirit often seems to quit the bonds of this our living mortal frame, to visit ideal regions. ”

“ Again they drift into the dark regions of slumber, lapped in silence and deep tranquillity, where the lights of men are extinguished, and the stars, redoubling their lustre, gleam whitest silver in heaven’s jetty dome. Midnight involves the world ”

“ She comes with the midnight—meet not her cold eye,
It shines but on those who are fated to die.
She comes with the midnight, when spirits have power—
She comes with the midnight, and evil the hour. ”

“ We do not wish to be elevated and improved. At midnight, away with such books! As for the literary pundits, the high priests of the Temple of Letters, it is interesting and helpful occasionally for an acolyte to swinge them a good hard one with an incense-burner, and cut and run, for a change, to something outside the rubrics. Midnight is the time when one can recall, with ribald delight, the names of all the Great Works which every gentleman ought to have read, but which some of us have not. ”

“ 'T was night, but night which the imperial moon,
Regal in her full beauty, turn'd to noon,
But still the noon of midnight; though the ray
Was clear and bright, it was not that of day; ”

“ Now comes the noontide hour—of all the hours, nearest akin to midnight, for each has its own calmness and repose. Soon, however, the world begins to turn again upon its axis, and it seems the busiest epoch of the day, when an accident impedes the march of sublunary things. ”

“ Just keep your ears open any time after midnight, when you are lying in bed in a lone attic of a dark night. What horrid, strange, suggestive, unaccountable noises you will hear! The stillness of night is a vulgar error. All the dead things seem to be alive. ”

“ But how does the exquisite spend his hours? It may be safely asserted that midnight very often passes before he seeks his bed, after the fatigues of the day and night—and that the sun has mounted high in the meridian before he awakes from slumbers which are not refreshing. ”

“ Noonday and midnight are alike; and, except a vague glimmer on the sky, that seems to define the hill-outlines to the south, we have nothing to tell us that this arctic world of ours has a sun. In one week more we shall reach the midnight of the year...... ”

“ The iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve.
Lovers, to bed; ’tis almost fairy time.
I fear we shall outsleep the coming morn
As much as we this night have overwatch’d. ”

“ Midnight always magnifies troubles, and as he brooded over his disappointments and railed at his fate, not only his past wrongs loomed up to colossal size, but a vague premonition of worse evil to come began to weigh on him. ”

“ Nothing, in fact, can equal the beauty of the northern summer's evening and night, if night it may be called that only wants the glare of day, the full light which frequently seems so impertinent, for I could write at midnight very well without a candle. ”

“ At Midnight
Now at last I have come to see what life is,
Nothing is ever ended, everything only begun,
And the brave victories that seem so splendid
Are never really won.
Even love that I built my spirit's house for,
Comes like a brooding and a baffled guest,
And music and men's praise and even laughter
Are not so good as rest. ”

“ To sit up till near midnight, and to get up just after midnight, are perhaps equally injurious, though not by any means equally common. Spend the close of each day at home; and go to bed early, with an empty or nearly an empty stomach, a cheerful temper, a quiet mind, and a good conscience. Let the air be pure, yourself pure, your clothing and bed simple and cool, and your room also cool. Wake with the first rays of the morning in summer, and about the same hour in winter. Get up as soon as you awake; and if your sleep has been insufficient, go to rest a little earlier the succeeding evening. ”

“ She had slept some hours, then she awoke in the middle of the night and started on her journey again, in order to travel as far as possible before the full heat of the day. For those travelling on foot in summer, midnight is more agreeable than midday. ”

“ Midnight is, indeed, a most important period with us. The obligation of fasting begins just when the leading clock of every town strikes twelve; and as no priest can celebrate mass, on any day whatever, if he has taken the smallest portion of meat or drink after the beginning of the civil day, I have often seen clergymen devouring their supper against time, the watch upon the table, and the anxious eye upon the fatal hand, while large mouthfuls, [Pg 240] chasing one another down their almost convulsed throats, appeared to threaten suffocation. ”

“ They say that, hung in ancient halls,
At midnight from the silent lute
A melancholy music falls
From chords which were by daylight mute.
And so the human heart by night
Is touched by some inspired tone,
Harmonious in the deep delight,
By day it knew not was its own. ”

“ Four or five hours in the night suffice—two just before midnight, lying down on one side; two just after one o'clock, lying down on the other. The rest of the silent hours are filled with eating and fidgeting and long grumbling soliloquies. ”

“ It came upon a midnight clear,
That glorious song of old,
From angels bending near the earth
To touch their harps of gold:
"Peace on the earth, good will to men,
From heav'n's all gracious King!"
The world in solemn stillness lay
To hear the angels sing. ”

“ Sleep before midnight really is more health-giving and beautifying than after midnight, for the reason that in all towns and cities there is less noise in the early hours of the night than after four in the morning, wherefore sleep is deeper between ten and twelve than between six and eight o’clock. ”

“ Midnight Thoughts. n silent hours of midnight while earth is wrapped in dreams,
I ponder o'er my present life—how desolate it seems.
Through wakeful hours I scan each page penned in despair and grief,
Then turn to my loved childhood's home for comfort and relief.
A cottage white was standing there among the grand old hills.
And 'midst the spreading shady trees were songs of laughing rills. ”

“ But at midnight,—strange, mystic hour!—when the veil between the frail present and the eternal future grows thin,—then came the messenger! ”

“ I take people who go to bed at midnight; many, it is true, go to bed much later; but as there are vast numbers who go to bed earlier, the balance is preserved. You retire at midnight, then, and you get up at eight in the morning ”

“ Indeed, to the sojourner in high latitudes the day is much more appreciable, for at no point yet visited by man is the darkness the total darkness of night throughout the entire day, while the "midnight sun" makes the night like noon-day. ”

“ Later it might have been possible to reckon it from noon to noon, when some method of fixing the moment of noon had been invented; some method, that is to say, of fixing the true north and south, and of noting that the sun was due south, or the shadow due north. Our own reckoning from midnight to midnight is a late method. Midnight is not marked by the peculiar position of any visible heavenly body; it has, in general, to be registered by some mechanical time-measurer. ”

“ It won't do for either of us to watch all night and be sleepy all day. We can split the night up into tricks. It isn't dark until seven and the days are getting longer. We'll make the first watch from dark until midnight, then midnight to four in the morning, and a short trick from four until daylight. We can make up lost sleep in the afternoons. ”

“ In the calm of the hard frost outside, the clear-cut strokes of the town clock counting off midnight penetrated the quietness of his suspended animation. ”

“ When a man—a young man—comes face to face with murder for the first time, making its acquaintance on a freezing December midnight and in a lonely spot, he is not to be blamed if his mental equilibrium is destroyed. ”

“ All night Midnight kept going and dawn found them at the edge of the high mesa. With the gray light about them they fed close to Sam’s deserted cabin. Midnight felt safer in these familiar surroundings. Even the cabin seemed to give a friendly protection to him. He crossed the meadow and halted near the head of the trail leading down into Shadow Canyon. The pinto was afraid of the cabin at first but when Midnight walked up to it in passing across the meadow and sniffed about, she joined him. The man smell was dead and old. It lacked the pungent freshness which roused fear and caused flight. ”

“ Often the only point distinguished is midnight, e. g. by the Kiowa [163] , the Masai [164] , the Shilluk [165] ; ‘the silence of the land’ among the Babwende [166] , ‘the back of night’ among the Hottentots [167] , ‘the time of sleep’ among the Hawaiians [168] . Hence arises of itself a threefold division in which the periods of night before and after midnight are distinguished, as e. g. ”

“ The black robes of the mare and her colt grew shaggy and thick, as the bitter cold deepened. Lady Ebony and Midnight were forced to seek grass at the upper end of the meadow below the cabin because the wind struck that part of the mesa, clearing the snow away. Every morning they plunged through deep drifts to reach the wind-swept portion of the meadow, returning again at night to their shelter. ”

“ The bay was reaching out with powerful strides which carried him over the rough ground at terrific speed. Midnight shrilled a warning to the mares. The pinto froze into terrified stillness. She did not run but stood rooted beside Midnight, staring at the oncoming rider. Midnight expected the roar of guns but no explosions came. He was sure other men were hidden below to cut off any retreat. But he was on the wrong side of the band of mares to drive them upward. He did what the charging cowboy least expected, something the chestnut stallion never would have done. ”

“ Far through the woods gleamed the flames of Our Lady’s Chapel, flinging fantastic shadows from the clustered foliage, and glancing on brooks that had never caught the sunlight. As the rangers traversed the midnight forest, staggering under their heavy burden, the tongue of the bell gave many a tremendous stroke,—clang, clang, clang!—a most doleful sound, as if it were tolling for the slaughter of the priests and the ruin of the chapel. Little dreamed Deacon Lawson and his townsmen that it was their own funeral knell. ”

“ But mostly it was a fight in silence and darkness, with the quick, hard breathing of men at the last desperate urge of their spent strength.
With her finger again upon the light switch, again she hesitated, and in that flash of time she heard all at once a quick, sobbing breath—a groan—then silence.
Somewhere out there in that midnight blackness her husband might be lying wounded—dead—above him the beast whom she had known as Ronald the Debonair, turning his face now toward the girl who, shivering and defenseless, crouched forlorn upon the bed. ”

“ To Whom the Mornings stand for Nights,
What must the Midnights — be! ”

“ Midnight plunged in and reared, lashing out with his hoofs, reached for the bay with his teeth. His pounding hoofs missed the saddler but his teeth nipped a gash in the horse’s flank. The bay was a high-spirited, nervous beast. He plunged and ducked his head. Grunting and snorting he started to pitch. Tex had to ride as he had132 never ridden before to control his mount. He saw Midnight whirl past, then wheel to charge again—the black stallion had gone stark mad. His hand dropped to the butt of his forty-five. He might have to shoot the big fellow to save himself. ”

“ Fill that whole region with an impenetrable gloom of smoke from a hundred miles of burning bagasse piles, when the river is over the banks, and turn a steamboat loose along there at midnight and see how she will feel. And see how you will feel, too! You find yourself away out in the midst of a vague dim sea that is shoreless, that fades out and loses itself in the murky distances; for you cannot discern the thin rib of embankment, and you are always imagining you see a straggling tree when you don't. ”

“ Midnight set to work pawing, breaking the crust and scooping the loose snow aside. He worked steadily all through the day, pausing at intervals to call for his mother. Two lean coyotes came out of the spruce and slipped across the meadow. A little fox thrust his sleek head out of a thicket which had been swept clear of snow. He wrinkled his nose as he crept forward. His furry, red brush waved back and fourth. Hunger had driven the three hunters into the open in the white light of day, hunger and the smell of fresh meat. The coyotes poked among the bones gnawing and snarling. ”