midnight
`` You must hang that picture upon the wall , '' said I. `` It is the most valuable you ever painted . Look at it daily , and , before the sun goes down , begin another on the same subject . '' My words produced no effect upon him , and indeed I knew that he was in a condition that entirely excluded external aid to his revolving thoughts . He was in the pit of dejection , which lies on the far side of the elevation of factitious excitement -- a place of darkness , where the scorpions of conscience sting to madness , and every thought that rises in the gloomy , bewildered mind appears like a ghost that walks at midnight over open graves and bones of the dead . To some , these spectres have spoken in such a way as to rouse the dormant principles of energetic amendment , that lie beyond the reach of precept , or even that of conscience ; but to the greater part of mankind this place of wailing and gnashing of teeth yields nothing but an agony that only tends to make them climb again the delusive mount from which they had fallen , though only again to be precipitated into the dreadful abode where , in the end , _ they must die _ . I knew that words had no effect upon my patient . I rose accordingly , and left him to the unmitigated horrors of his situation , in the expectation that he might be one of the few that derive from it good .