Inquietante cinzento. Melville.

Everything was mute and calm; everything gray. The sea, though undulated into long roods of swells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked at the surface like waved lead that has cooled and set in the smelter’s mould. The sky seemed a gray surtout. Flights of troubled gray fowl, kith and kin with flights of troubled gray vapors among which they were mixed, skimmed low and fitfully over the waters, as swallows over meadows before storms. Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come.

(Benito Cereno, início)

Most melancholy of all the hours of earth, is that one long, gray hour, which to the watcher by the lamp intervenes between the night and day; when both lamp and watcher, over-tasked, grow sickly in the pallid light; and the watcher, seeking for no gladness in the dawn, sees naught but garish vapors there; and almost invokes a curse upon the public day, that shall invade his lonely night of sufferance.

The one small window of his closet looked forth upon the meadow, and across the river, and far away to the distant heights, storied with the great deeds of the Glendinnings. Many a time had Pierre sought this window before sunrise, to behold the blood-red, out-flinging dawn, that would wrap those purple hills as with a banner. But now the morning dawned in mist and rain, and came drizzlingly upon his heart. Yet as the day advanced, and once more showed to him the accustomed features of his room by that natural light, which, till this very moment, had never lighted him but to his joy; now that the day, and not the night, was witness to his woe; now first the dread reality came appallingly upon him. A sense of horrible forlornness, feebleness, impotence, and infinite, eternal desolation possessed him. It was not merely mental, but corporeal also. He could not stand; and when he tried to sit, his arms fell floorwards as tied to leaden weights. Dragging his ball and chain, he fell upon his bed; for when the mind is cast down, only in sympathetic proneness can the body rest; whence the bed is often Grief's first refuge. Half stupefied, as with opium, he fell into the profoundest sleep.

(Pierre, or the ambiguities, V, III) 

In sight at gray dawn, the distant vessel, though in reality approaching, recedes from view, as the sun rises higher and higher. This holds true, till its vicinity makes it readily fall within the ordinary scope of vision. And thus, too, here and there, with other distant things: the more light you throw on them, the more you obscure. Some revelations show best in a twilight.

(Mardi, XIX)

It was in the cool of the early morning, at that hour when a man's
face can be known, that we set sail from Diranda; and in the ghostly
twilight, our thoughts reverted to the phantom that so suddenly had
cleared the plain. 

(Mardi, XXXVIII)