midnight
As he listened , rapt and vaguely wondering , the sense of his tranced sinking seemed to come to an end , and with the feeling of one who had been descending for many hours , and at length lay motionless at the bottom of a deep , dark chasm , he heard the music fail and cease . A pause , and then it rose again , blended with the solemn voices of the choir , sublimed and dilated now , reaching him as though from weird night gulfs of the upper air , and charged with an overmastering pathos as of the lamentations of angels . In the dimness and silence , in the aroused and exalted condition of his being , the strains seemed unearthly in their immense and desolate grandeur of sorrow , and their mournful and dark significance was now for him . Working within him the impression of vast , innumerable fleeing shadows , thick-crowding memories of all the ways and deeds of an existence fallen from its early dreams and aims , poured across the midnight of his soul , and under the streaming melancholy of the dirge , his life showed like some monstrous treason . It did not terrify or madden him ; he listened to it rapt utterly as in some deadening ether of dream ; yet feeling to his inmost core all its powerful grief and accusation , and quietly aghast at the sinister consciousness it gave him . Still it swelled , gathering and sounding on into yet mightier pathos , till all at once it darkened and spread wide in wild despair , and aspiring again into a pealing agony of supplication , quivered and died away in a low and funereal sigh . The tears streamed suddenly upon his face ; his soul lightened and turned dark within him ; and , as one faints away , so consciousness swooned , and he fell suddenly down a precipice of sleep .