Not to mention that a slight improvement would be: "The night was stormy."
Only slight, I'll reiterate. But, hey, the sentence is more active, and for God's sake, it's NIGHT[/b]. Of course it's DARK, unless you live where I do and it's midsummer.
But this opening, overall, quickly signals a distant omni POV unless it gets established in the next paragraph that some character is actually observing this and reporting it as narrator. Not that that's a bad thing, as Seinfeld would say, but a writer needs to understand the effect this kind of narration has on the reader's experience.
And, remember, Bulwer-Lytton was writing in a time when such forms of prose were more fashionable than they are today. You can find similar things which come across to our more modern sensitivities as similar atrocities in Dickens, Trollope, Eliot and others of the time.
And, yes, I know that Madeleine l'Engle stole that line for the opening of her most famed novel. I don't know if it was intended satirically or not, but her novel is damn good, regardless.
