midnight
It does not lessen the horror of darkness that fear makes use of the imagination for its agencies . Fancy , intuition , and the train that follows the inner vision , these make of night a phantasmagoria , compared to which Milton 's inferno is a place of comparative repose . If you would realize the wondrous necromancy of the sun , pass a night in some primeval forest , untouched by the hand of man . Until he stands in the awful silence of the midnight wood , or upon some vast waste of nature , no man can figure to himself the varied shapes the mind can give to terrors based upon the mysterious noises of nature , and the goblin motions of inanimate things . The lover thinking of his lass welcomes the night and the rapturous walks among well-known scenes and kindly objects . With glimmering lamps in the foliage and the not distant sounds of daily life , even the woods have nothing fearful to the meditative or the distraught . But in flight , with fear as a garment that can not be laid aside , the somber forms of the forest are more terrible than an army with banners , as a haunted house is a more unnerving dread than burglars or any form of night marauders .