midnight
Such is their love for all good objects , such their eagerness to sympathize with all their suffering fellow-creatures ! But there is nothing they pity as they pity a lonely young man . I am sure , I sympathize with her in this instance . To see a pale student burning away , like his own midnight lamp , with only dead men 's hands to hold , stretched out to him from the sepulchres of books , and dead men 's souls imploring him from their tablets to warm them over again just for a little while in a human consciousness , when all this time there are soft , warm , living hands that would ask nothing better than to bring the blood back into those cold thin fingers , and gently caressing natures that would wind all their tendrils about the unawakened heart which knows so little of itself , is pitiable enough and would be sadder still if we did not have the feeling that sooner or later the pale student will be pretty sure to feel the breath of a young girl against his cheek as she looks over his shoulder ; and that he will come all at once to an illuminated page in his book that never writer traced in characters , and never printer set up in type , and never binder enclosed within his covers ! But our young man seems farther away from life than any student whose head is bent downwards over his books . His eyes are turned away from all human things . How cold the moonlight is that falls upon his forehead , and how white he looks in it !