midnight
-- On -- on ! '' The horses smoked and galloped along a road that wound through venerable and ancient groves . The moonlight slept soft upon the sward , and the cattle , disturbed from their sleep , rose lazily up , and gazed upon the unseasonable intruder . It is a wild and weird scene , one of those noble English parks at midnight , with its rough forest-ground broken into dell and valley , its never-innovated and mossy grass , overrun with fern , and its immemorial trees , that have looked upon the birth , and look yet upon the graves , of a hundred generations . Such spots are the last proud and melancholy trace of Norman knighthood and old romance left to the laughing landscapes of cultivated England . They always throw something of shadow and solemn gloom upon minds that feels their associations , like that which belongs to some ancient and holy edifice . They are the cathedral aisles of Nature with their darkened vistas , and columned trunks , and arches of mighty foliage .