“That memorable day died in purple and gold, and just as the last traces of the sunset faded in the west and the star-lilies filled the sky, the full moon looked down over the rim of the valley, and the great rocks, catching the silvery glow, came forth out of the dusky shadows like very spirits.”
" A Rival of the Yosemite: The Cañon of the South Fork of King's River, California http://books.google.com/books?id=fWoiAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA77" The Century Magazine, volume XLIII, number 1 (November 1891) pages 77-97 (at page 86)
1890s
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John Muir 183
Scottish-born American naturalist and author 1838–1914Related quotes

“The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold”
Lord Byron, The Destruction of Sennacherib
About
Source: Argonautica (3rd century BC), Book IV. Homeward Bound, Lines 167–173

St. 25.
Morituri Salutamus http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/longfellow/19229 (1875)
Source: The Complete Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

letter to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr (December 1872); published as " A Geologist's Winter Walk http://books.google.com/books?id=OAEbAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA355", Overland Monthly, volume 10, number 4 (April 1873) pages 355-358 (at page 358); modified slightly and reprinted in Steep Trails (1918), chapter 2
1870s

“Something in me vibrates to a dusky, dreamy smell of dying moons and shadows.”

(zh-CN) 一样是月明,
一样是隔山灯火,
满天的星
只使人不见,
梦似的挂起。
"Do Not Throw Away" (《别丢掉》), translated by Michelle Yeh in A Chorus for Peace: A Global Anthology of Poetry by Women (University of Iowa Press, 2002), p. 41
Variant translation:
The moon is still so bright;
Beyond the hills the lamp sheds the same light.
The sky besprinkled with star on star,
But I do not know where you are.
It seems
You hang above like dreams.
Xu Yuanchong, Vanished Springs: The Life and Love of a Chinese Intellectual (Vantage Press, 1999), pp. 44–45