The warm, soft dark of night

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One of the manifold idioms that flowed from the verbose quill of that tedious Austrian plowright Otto Büchstein and buried themselves directly into the inflated bowels of the English literary canon.

From Die Schweizer Heulsuse, which Büchstein is supposed to have penned between episodes of delirium, as he lay dying of dengue fever in filthy sanitorium in old Mandalay:

Triago: Though my shaking pen prescribes a bitter arc
Yet carveth it these precious extant moments
To keep them safe from, and above, the noisy din
That hungrily devours much earnest wordage.
Yea, I wouldst preserve it, yet
Upon the mannish tabernacle
Wherein are etched, in faltering runes,
The mortal strokes of Sapiens’ accomplishment
Herewith, my paltry contribution: mark it well:
We are dying, Eritrea, dying — And in the warm, soft dark of night Where phantoms scratch and scale The crumbling battlements of mental strife