Re Nabokov and Eliot, let us now add Joyce.

 

    To quote from page 251 of Richard Ellmann's James Joyce (Oxford University Press, New and Revised Edition, 1982) on the ending of "The Dead":

 

     The fine description: `It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves,' is probably borrowed by Joyce  from a famous simile in the twelfth book of the Illiad, which Thoreau translates: `The snowflakes fell thick and fast on a winter's day.  The winds are lulled, and the snow falls incessant, covering the tops of the mountains, and the hills, and the plains where the lotus-tree grows, and the cultivated fields, and they are falling by the inlets and shores of the foaming sea, but are silently dissolved by the waves'

 

      Robert H, Boyle :