n" sang:

I should indeed as soon expect
That Peg-a-lantern would direct
Me straightway home on misty night
As wand'ring stars, quite out of sight.

In Shakespeare's _Tempest_[84] a sailor exclaims: "Your fairy, which,
you say, is a harmless fairy, has done little better than played the
Jack with us". Dr. Johnson commented that the reference was to "Jack
with a lantern". Milton wrote also of the "wandering fire",

Which oft, they say, some evil spirit attends,
Hovering and blazing with delusive light,
Misleads th' amaz'd night wand'rer from his way
To bogs and mires, and oft through pond or pool;
There swallowed up and lost from succour far.[85]

"When we stick in the mire", sang Drayton, "he doth with laughter
leave us." These fires were also "fallen stars", "death fires", and
"fire drakes":

So have I seen a fire drake glide along
Before a dying man, to point his grave,
And in it stick and hide.[86]

Pliny referred to the wandering lights as stars.[87] The Sumerian
"mulla" was undoubtedly an evil spirit. In some countries the "fire
drake" is a bird with gleaming breast: in Babylonia it assumed the
form of a bull, and may have had some connection with the bull of
lshtar. Like the Indian "Dasyu" and "Dasa",[88] Gallu was applied in
the sense of "foreign devil" to human and superhuman adversaries of
certain monarchs. Some of the supernatural beings resemble our elves
and fairies and the Indian Rakshasas. Occasionally they appear in
comely human guise; at other times they are vaguely monstrous. The
best known of this class is Lilith, who, according to Hebrew
tradition, preserved in the Talmud, was the demon lover of Adam. She
has been immortalized by Dante Gabriel Rossetti:

Of Adam's first wife Lilith, it is told
(The witch he loved before the gift of Eve)
That, ere the snake's, her sweet tongue could deceive,
And her enchanted hair was the first gold.
And still she sits, young while the earth is old,
And, subtly of herself contemplative,
Draws men to watch the bright web she can weave,
Till heart and body and life are in its hold.
The rose and poppy are her flowers; for where
Is he not found, O Lilith, whom shed scent
And soft shed kisses and soft sleep shall snare?
Lo! as that youth's eyes burned at thine, so went
Thy spell through him, and left his straight neck bent
And round his heart one strangling