This rebellious nature naturally yields to the arguments of Lucifer, a spirit in which much of the grandeur of Milton’s Satan is added to the subtlety of Mephistopheles.  In the first scene Cain is introduced, rebelling against toils imposed on him by an offence committed before he was born,—­“I sought not to be born”—­the answer, that toil is a good, being precluded by its authoritative representation as a punishment; in which mood he is confirmed by the entrance and reasonings of the Tempter, who identifies the Deity with Seva the Destroyer, hints at the dreadful visitation of the yet untasted death; when Adah, entering, takes him at first for an angel, and then recognizes him as a fiend.  Her invocation to Eve, and comparison of the “heedless, harmless, wantonness of bliss” in Eden, to the later lot of those girt about with demons from whose fascination they cannot fly, is one of the most striking in the drama; as is the line put into the mouth of the poet’s most beautiful female character, to show that God cannot be alone,—­

  What else can joy be, but diffusing joy?

Her subsequent contrast of Lucifer with the other angels is more after the style of Shelley than anything else in Byron—­

    As the silent sunny moon,
  All light, they look upon us.  But thou seemst
  Like an ethereal night, where long white clouds
  Streak the deep purple, and unnumber’d stars
  Spangle the wonderful mysterious vault
  With things that look as if they would be suns—­
  So beautiful, unnumber’d and endearing;
  Not dazzling, and yet drawing us to them,
  They fill my eyes with tears, and so dost thou.

The flight with Lucifer, in the second act, in the abyss of space and through the Hades of “uncreated night,” with the vision of long-wrecked worlds, and the interminable gloomy realms

  Of swimming shadows and enormous shapes,

—­suggested, as the author tells us, by the reading of Cuvier—­leaves us with impressions of grandeur and desolation which no other passages of English poetry can convey.  Lord Byron has elsewhere exhibited more versatility of fancy and richness of illustration, but nowhere else has he so nearly “struck the stars.”  From constellation to constellation the pair speed on, cleaving the blue with mighty wings, but finding in all a blank, like that in Richter’s wonderful dream.  The result on the mind of Cain is summed in the lines on the fatal tree,—­

  It was a lying tree—­for we know nothing;
  At least, it promised knowledge at the price
  Of death—­but knowledge still; but, what knows man?

A more modern poet answers, after beating at the same iron gates, “Behold, we know not anything.”  The most beautiful remaining passage is Cain’s reply to the question—­what is more beautiful to him than all that he has seen in the “unimaginable ether"?—­