This poem, indeed, is a perfect gallery of art, whose paintings and statues are drawn and fashioned from the life, with the skill of a consummate master and the facility of a powerful creative, divinely endowed genius. He places his hand on the broad canvas of life, and behold the figures that rise under his magic pencil! They are, indeed, too often dark, stern, mysterious and awful, stained with vices, and pre-doomed, for their guilt, to the pains of a terrible reprobation. With such characters the genius of Byron had a strange sympathy. Hence his admiration of that historical passage in the Scriptures, in which the crime and the doom of Saul is so solemnly set forth at the tomb of the prophet Samuel, whose sepulchral slumbers were so rudely disturbed by the intrusion of the anxious and distressed monarch, now forsaken by his God. Shakspeare, having finished off one of these dark and repulsive pictures, as in his Macbeth or Lear, passes to the sketching of more cheerful and even humorous portraits; but Byron, for the most part, delights to dwell in darkness. Thus, in this poem, when the curse is imprecated, the time midnight, the scene the ruined site of the temple of the Furies, the auditors the ghosts of departed years, the imprecator a spirit fallen from an unwonted height of glory to the depths of wo. Principals and accessaries assume the sombre coloring of his imagination, from which, however, at times, shoots a gleam of beauty, that imparts loveliness to the whole scene. Milton, with his almost perfect sense of beauty, and the fitness of things, would never have put such words as these in the mouth of his Eve: “May the grass wither from thy foot! the woods Deny thee shelter—earth a home—the dust A grave! the sun his light! and Heaven her God!” Cain.