midnight
Not by constitution disposed to gloom , there was a mysteriousness in those impulses which led him at this time to rovings like these . But hereby stoic influences were at work , to fit him at a soon-coming day for enacting a part in the last extremities here seen ; when by sickness , destitution , each busy ill of exile , he was destined to experience a fate , uncommon even to luckless humanity -- a fate whose crowning qualities were its remoteness from relief and its depth of obscurity -- London , adversity , and the sea , three Armageddons , which , at one and the same time , slay and secrete their victims . For the most part , what befell Israel during his forty years wanderings in the London deserts , surpassed the forty years in the natural wilderness of the outcast Hebrews under Moses . In that London fog , went before him the ever-present cloud by day , but no pillar of fire by the night , except the cold column of the monument , two hundred feet beneath the mocking gilt flames on whose top , at the stone base , the shiverer , of midnight , often laid down . But these experiences , both from their intensity and his solitude , were necessarily squalid . Best not enlarge upon them . For just as extreme suffering , without hope , is intolerable to the victim , so , to others , is its depiction without some corresponding delusive mitigation .