About the noon of night. [ Ben Jonson ]

Hushed as midnight silence. [ Dryden ]

I gaze upon the thousand stars
That fill the midnight sky;
And wish, so passionately wish,
A light like theirs on high.
I have such eagerness of hope
To benefit my kind;
I feel as if immortal power
Were given to my mind. [ Miss Landon ]

O wild and wondrous midnight.
There is a might in thee
To make the charmed body
Almost like spirit be,
And give it some faint glimpses
Of immortality! [ Lowell ]

Whence is thy learning? hath thy toil
O'er books consumed the midnight oil? [ Gay ]

It is the hour when from the boughs
The nightingale's high note is heard;
It is the hour when lovers' vows
Seem sweet in every whispered word. [ Byron ]

I'll dream no more - by manly mind
Not even in sleep is will resigned.
My midnight orisons said o'er,
I'll turn to rest, and dream no more. [ Scott ]

In the dead vast and middle of the night. [ William Shakespeare ]

A song to the oak, the brave old oak,
Who hath ruled in the greenwood long;
Here's health and renown to his broad,
green crown, And his fifty arms so strong.
There's fear in his frown when the goes down,
And the fire in the West fades out;
And he showeth his might on a wild midnight,
When the storms through his branches shout. [ H. F. Chorley ]

The iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve;
Lovers, to bed; 'tis almost fairy time. [ William Shakespeare ]

That hour, of night's black arch the keystone. [ Burns ]

'Tis midnight now. The bent and broken moon,
Battered and black, as from a thousand battles,
Hangs silent on the purple walls of Heaven. [ Joaquin Miller ]

And soon
Their hushing dances languished to a stand,
Like midnight leaves when, as the Zephyrs swoon.
All on their drooping stems they sink unfanned. [ Hood ]

Midnight hags.
By force of potent spells, of bloody characters,
And conjurations, horrible to hear,
Call fiends and spectres from the yawning deep,
And set the ministers of hell at work. [ Rowe ]

How is night's sable mantle labored over.
How richly wrought with attributes divine!
What wisdom shines! what love! this midnight pomp.
This gorgeous arch, with golden worlds inlaid!
Built with divine ambition. [ Young ]

One hour's sleep before midnight is worth two after. [ Proverb ]

One hour's sleep before midnight is worth three after. [ Herbert ]

Midnight brought on the dusky hour friendliest to sleep and silence. [ Milton ]

Midnight! the outpost of advancing day! The frontier town and citadel of night! [ Longfellow ]

Now had night measured, with her shadowy cone, half-way up hill this vast sublunar vault. [ Milton ]

This dead of midnight is the noon of thought, and wisdom mounts her zenith with the stars. [ Mrs. Barbauld ]

Midnight, - strange mystic hour, - when the veil between the frail present and the eternal future grows thin. [ Mrs. Stowe ]

The night, proceeding on with silent pace, stood in her noon, and viewed with equal face her sleepy rise and her declining race. [ Dryden ]

When pleasure, like the midnight flower that scorns the eye of vulgar light, begins to bloom for sons of night and maids who love the moon. [ Moore ]

Woman was formed to admire; man to be admirable. His are the glories of the sun at noonday; hers the softened splendors of the midnight moon. [ Sir P. Sidney ]

It is now the very witching time of night; when churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out contagion to this world: now could I drink hot blood, and do such business as the bitter day would quake to look on. [ William Shakespeare ]

What laborious days, what watchings by the midnight lamp, what rackings of the brain, what hopes and fears, what long lives of laborious study, are here sublimized into print, and condensed into the narrow compass of these surrounding shelves! [ Horace Smith ]

The stifled hum of midnight, when traffic has lain down to rest, and the chariot wheels of Vanity, still rolling here and there through distant streets are bearing her to halls roofed in and lighted to the due pitch for her; and only vice and misery, to prowl or to moan like night birds, are abroad. [ Carlyle ]

In the matter of diet - which is another main thing - I have been persistently strict in sticking to the things which didn't agree with me until one or the other of us got the best of it. Until lately I got the best of it myself. But last spring I stopped frolicking with mince-pie after midnight; up to then I had always believed it wasn't loaded. For thirty years I have taken coffee and bread at eight in the morning, and no bite nor sup until seven-thirty in the evening. Eleven hours. That is all right for me, and is wholesome, because I have never had a headache in my life, but headachy people would not reach seventy comfortably by that road, and they would be foolish to try it. And I wish to urge upon you this - which I think is wisdom - that if you find you can't make seventy by any but an uncomfortable road, don't you go. When they take off the Pullman and retire you to the rancid smoker, put on your things, count your checks, and get out at the first way station where there's a cemetery. [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]