h
More beautiful, as being a thing more holy," etc.

_Works_, 1889, p. 772.]

[cj] {252} _Which my sire shrinks from--Death_----.--[MS. erased.]

[120] {254}[In Byron's Diary for January 28, 1821, we find the following
entry--

"_Thought for a speech of Lucifer, in the Tragedy of Cain_.

"Were _Death_ an _evil_, would _I_ let thee _live_?
Fool! live as I live--as thy father lives.
And thy sons' sons shall live for evermore!"

_Letters_, 1901, v. 191.]

[121] [Matthew Arnold (_Poetry of Byron_, 1881, p. xxii.) quotes these
lines as an instance of Byron's unknowingness and want of humour. It
cannot be denied that he leaves imbedded in his fabric lumps of unshapen
material, which mar the symmetry of his art. Lucifer's harangue involves
a reference to "hard words ending in _ism_." The _spirit_ of error, not
the Manichaean heresy, should have proceeded out of his lips.]

[122] ["Cain is a proud man: if Lucifer promised him kingdoms, etc., it
would _elate_ him: the object of the Demon is to _depress_ him still
further in his own estimation than he was before, by showing him
infinite things and his own abasement, till he falls into the frame of
mind that leads to the catastrophe, from mere _internal_ irritation,
_not_ premeditation, or envy of Abel (which would have made him
contemptible), but from the rage and fury against the inadequacy of his
state to his conceptions, and which discharges itself rather against
Life, and the author of Life, than the mere living."--Letter to Moore,
November 3, 1821, _Letters_, 1901, v. 470. Here, no doubt, Byron is
speaking _in propria persona_. It was this sense of limitation, of human
nothingness, which provoked an "internal irritation ... a rage and fury
against the inadequacy of his state to his conceptions." His "spirit
beats its mortal bars," not, like Galahad, to be possessed by, but to
possess the Heavenly Vision.]

[123] {255}[Compare--

"What though the field be lost,
All is not lost; th' unconquerable will
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield."

_Paradise Lost_, i. 105-108.]

[124] {257}[An obsolete form of _carnation_, the colour of "flesh."]

[125] [Compare--

"Her dewy eyes are closed,
And on their lids, whose texture fine
Scarc