“Back to thy hell! 
Thou hast no power upon me, that I feel! 
Thou never shall possess me, that I know;
What I have done is done; I bear within
A torture which could nothing gain from thine;
* * * * *
Back, ye baffled fiends! 
The hand of death is on me—­but not yours!”

Cain, while suffering remorse for the slaying of Abel, is borne by Lucifer through the boundless fields of the universe.  Cain yet dares to question the wisdom of the Almighty in bringing evil, sin, and remorse into the world.  A critic has remarked that “Milton wrote his great poem to justify the ways of God to man; Byron’s object seems to be to justify the ways of man to God.”

The very soul of stormy revolt breathes through both Manfred and Cain, but Cain has more interest as a pure drama.  It contains some sweet passages and presents one lovely woman,—­Adah.  But Byron could not interpret character wholly at variance with his own.  He possessed but little constructive skill, and he never overcame the difficulties of blank verse.  A drama that does not show wide sympathy with varied types of humanity and the constructive capacity to present the complexities of life is lacking in essential elements of greatness.

Childe Harold, The Vision of Judgment, and Don Juan.—­His best works are the later poems, which require only a slight framework or plot, such as Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, The Vision of Judgement, and Don Juan.

The third and fourth cantos of Childe Harold, published in 1816 and 1818, respectively, are far superior to the first two.  These later cantos continue the travels of Harold, and contain some of Byron’s most splendid descriptions of nature, cities, and works of art.  Rome, Venice, the Rhine, the Alps, and the sea inspired the finest lines.  He wrote of Venice as she—­

  “...Sate in state, throned on her hundred isles!
       * * * * *
  She looks a sea Cybele, fresh from ocean,
  Rising with her tiara of proud towers
  At airy distance.”

He calls Rome—­

  “The Niobe of nations! there she stands. 
    Childless and crownless, in her voiceless woe;
  An empty urn within her wither’d hands,
    Whose holy dust was scattered long ago.”

The following description, from Canto III, of a wild stormy night in the mountains is very characteristic of his nature poetry and of his own individuality:—­

  “And this is in the night:—­Most Glorious night! 
    Thou wert not sent for slumber! let me be
  A sharer in thy fierce and far delight—­
    A portion of the tempest and of thee! 
    How the lit lake shines, a phosphoric sea,
  And the big rain comes dancing to the earth! 
    And now again ’tis black,—­and now, the glee
  of the loud hills shakes with its mountain-mirth
    As if they did rejoice o’er a young earthquake’s birth”