midnight
`` From -- from the _ Mahomet _ , in the usual course -- '' `` Good night , Admiral ; I would be alone '' . At that very hour a world-tragedy was being enacted over the dark and turbulent ocean , and the immensest of Empires was sinking into the sea . Darkly , quietly , with no mighty and multitudinous tumult of man . That midnight the night-glass of many a mystified merchantman searched the murk for those coruscations with which the crescent of forts had constellated the Atlantic , the mariner 's sea-rent waiting ready , with his ship 's - papers , in his cash box : but no galaxy of lights glanced that night . To some , before this , they had appeared , but , as the ship approached , had vanished , and it was as though the swarm of the Pleiades had been caught from the skies before their eyes . Long before dawn ships separated by three thousand miles had gained the assurance that this or that sea-fort no longer rode the familiar spot-had been rapt to the stars , had sunk , had somehow passed from being . Before this monstrous marvel the mariner stood dumb , and it was afterwards said that that wild night the terminals of heaven and earth were lost , that the storm-winds were haunted , in all the air lamentation , sobbings as for swallowed orbs , and the whisper : `` It is finished '' .