midnight
He took each corpse in his powerful arms , and unaided laid it down in its last resting-place , as gently as if he were laying down on a soft couch a sleeper whom he feared to awaken . Lycidas caught a glimpse of the pale placid face of one of the shrouded forms , but needed not that glimpse to feel certain that those whose remains were thus secretly interred by kinsmen or friends at the peril of their lives , were the same as those whose martyrdom he had so indignantly witnessed . The Athenian knew enough of the Syrian tyrant to estimate how daring and how difficult must have been the feat of rescuing so many of the bodies of his victims from the dishonour of being left to the dog or the vulture . The devotion of the living , as well as the martyrdom of the dead , gave an interest to that midnight burial which no earthly pomp could have lent . The spirit of the young Athenian glowed with generous sympathy ; and of high descent and proud antecedents as he was , Lycidas would have deemed it an honour to have helped to dig that wide grave for the eight slaughtered Jews . The burial was conducted in solemn silence , save as regarded the Hebrew matron , and her deep thrilling accents were meeter requiem for the martyrs than the loudest lamentations of hired mourners would have been . As the chief received each lifeless form into his arms , the matron uttered a short sentence over it , in which words of the ancient Hebrew spoken by her fathers blended with the Chaldee , then the language commonly used by the Jews .