Life & Wisdom Quote by George William Russell

Twilight arrives here as prey, not just a pretty gradient. Calling it a “timid, fawn” makes the hour between day and night feel small, vulnerable, almost innocent - a living thing that can be startled and taken. Then comes the turn: Night isn’t a blanket settling over the world; it’s a “dark-blue hunter” moving with purpose, “followed fast.” Russell stages dusk as a chase, compressing an everyday transition into a miniature drama of inevitability. The line works because it smuggles narrative into description: you don’t just see the light fading, you feel time bearing down.

The color choice matters. “Dark-blue” avoids the blunt finality of black; it’s nocturne rather than void, sensuous rather than merely threatening. That tonal richness keeps the “hunter” image from becoming pure menace. Night is predatory, yes, but also natural, almost mythic - part of a cycle that can’t be argued with.

Russell (AE), writing out of the Irish Literary Revival and a theosophical, symbolist sensibility, often treats the visible world as a mask for spiritual motion. Read in that context, the fawn and hunter aren’t just weather. They hint at the psyche: delicate perception slipping away as a more ancient, instinctual darkness takes over. “Glimmering by” suggests how quickly the fragile window of clarity passes, and how little agency we have in holding it. The subtext isn’t that night is evil; it’s that change is relentless, and beauty often arrives already in flight.