d, but is hardly a more impressive invention of
Gothic fantasy than Caliban sprawling in the pit's much mire,

With elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin,

while he discourses, with a half-developed consciousness, itself in the
mire and scarcely yet pawing to get free, concerning the nature of his
Creator. The grotesque here is not merely of the kind that addresses the
eye; the poem is an experiment in the grotesque of thought; and yet
fantastic as it seems, the whole process of this monstrous Bridgewater
treatise is governed by a certain logic. The poem, indeed, is
essentially a fragment of Browning's own Christian apologetics; it
stands as a burly gate-tower from which boiling pitch can be flung upon
the heads of assailants. The poet's intention is not at all to give us a
chapter in the origins of religion; nor is Caliban a representative of
primitive man. A frequently recurring idea with Browning is that
expressed by Pope Innocent in the passage already cited; the external
world proves the power of God; it proves His intelligence: but the proof
of love is derived exclusively from the love that lives in the heart of
man. Are you dissatisfied with such a proof? Well, then, see what a god
we can construct out of intelligence and power, with love left out! If
this world is not a place of trial and training appointed by love, then
it is a scene of capricious cruelty or capricious indifference on the
part of our Maker; His providence is a wanton sporting with our weakness
and our misery. Why were we brought into being? To amuse His solitary
and weary intelligence, and to become the victims or the indulged
manifestations of His power. Why is one man selected for extreme agony
from which a score of his fellows escape? Because god Setebos resembles
Caliban, when through mere caprice he lets twenty crabs march past him
unhurt and stones the twenty-first,

Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.

If any of the phenomena of nature lead us to infer or imagine some law
superior to the idle artistry and reckless will of Setebos, that law is
surely very far away; it is "the Quiet" of Caliban's theology which
takes no heed of human life and has for its outposts the cold unmoving
stars.

Except the short piece named _May and Death_, which like Rossetti's
poem of the wood-spurge, is founded upon one of those freaks of
association that make some trival object the special remembrancer of
sorrow, the remaining poems