[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 Manichæan 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 propriâ personâ_. 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 Scarce hides the dark-blue orbs beneath, The baby Sleep is pillowed." Shelley's _Queen Mab_, i., _ibid._, p. 104.] [126] {258}["Time is our consciousness of the succession of ideas in our mind.... One man is stretched on the rack during twelve hours, another sleeps soundly in his bed. The difference of time perceived by these two persons is immense: one hardly will believe that half an hour has elapsed, the other could credit that centuries had flown during his agony."--Shelley's note to the lines-- " ... the thoughts that rise In time-destroying infiniteness." _Queen Mab_, viii., _ibid._, p. 136.] [127] {259}[_Vide ante_, p. 208.] [128] {260}[It is Adah, Cain's wife, who suggests the disastrous compromise, not a "burnt-offering," but the "fruits of the earth," which would cost the giver little or nothing--an instance in point of Lucifer's cynical reminder (_vide ante_, act ii. sc. 2, line 210, p. 247) "that there are some things still which woman may tempt man to."]