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.
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