The Fourth Night Watch (1923)
Context: It was as if he sat in cross currents from many eternities — some with a grey cold light over them, others completely in darkness. Was it the agony of Gethsemane? The disintegration of his body was in full swing. He remained sitting there, remembering something he had experienced one night last winter. It seemed to him that the great silence, which only comes when a human being has drawn his last breath, enveloped him. And suddenly Kathryn was standing beside his bed. She took his hand in hers and smiled sadly. "Do you wish, Husband, that I shall pray for you, that you may still live?" she asked. "Here, from where I now am, it is not such a long way to God as from the place where you are." Her voice was without reproach, and all fear and suffering had left her face.
"Oh, my dear," he had said. "Do not intervene in the wise counsels of God. Don't you hate me, Kathryn?"
She smiled again. "There is no hate here. No, Husband, I love you more dearly now than when I lived — but it is with another love, a love purified of all self-love." But he couldn't quite decide whether this was a dream or a vision. Now, when his earthly happiness was in ruins, his spirit became more and more liberated. The eyes of his soul had the land of Canaan in sight. He had come closer now. He noticed it in so many things.
“Grey-eyed Athene sent them a favourable gale, a fresh West Wind, singing over the wine-dark sea.”
II. 420–421 (tr. S. H. Butcher and Andrew Lang).
Odyssey (c. 725 BC)
Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906), p. 119 (note 2), in: 'Fumées dans la campagne', Edmond Jaloux
David Lin (2015) cited in " Future of diplomatic ties uncertain: Lin http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2015/10/22/2003630648" on Taipei Times, 22 October 2015
“A thin grey fog hung over the city, and the streets were very cold; for summer was in England.”
Source: The Light That Failed [Illustrated]
Hercule Poirot
The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920)
1960s, A Christmas Sermon (1967)
St. XL
Adonais (1821)
Context: He has outsoared the shadow of our night;
Envy and calumny and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight,
Can touch him not and torture not again;
From the contagion of the world's slow stain
He is secure, and now can never mourn
A heart grown cold, a head grown grey in vain.
“Without reading, we are all without light in the dark, without fire in the cold.”
Source: Tortall and Other Lands: A Collection of Tales
