an. Perhaps I cannot hit him off better than by saying
that he represents, both in body and soul, a sort of intermediate
nature between man and brute, with an infusion of something that
belongs to neither; as though one of the transformations imagined by
the Developmentists had stuck midway in its course, where a breath or
vapour of essential Evil had knit itself vitally into his texture.
Caliban has all the attributes of humanity from the moral downwards,
so that his nature touches and borders upon the sphere of moral life;
still the result but approves his exclusion from such life, in that it
brings him to recognize moral law only as making for self; that is, he
has intelligence of seeming wrong in what is done to him, but no
conscience of what is wrong in his own doings. It is a most singular
and significant stroke in the delineation, that sleep seems to loosen
the fetters of his soul, and lift him above himself: then indeed, and
then only, "the muddy vesture of decay" doth not so "grossly close him
in," but that some proper spirit-notices come upon him; as if in his
passive state the voice of truth and good vibrated down _to_ his
soul, and stopped there, being unable to kindle any answering tones
within: so that in his waking hours they are to him but as the memory
of a dream.

"Sometime a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices,
That, if I then had wak'd after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me; that, when I wak'd,
I cried to dream again."

Thus Caliban is part man, part demon, part brute, each being drawn
somewhat out of itself by combination with the others, and the union
of all preventing him from being either; for which cause language has
no generic term that fits him. Yet this strange, uncouth, but
life-like confusion of natures Prospero has educated into a sort of
poet. This, however, has nowise tamed, it has rather increased, his
innate malignity and crookedness of disposition; education having of
course but _educed_ what was in him. Even his poetry is, for the most
part, made up of the fascinations of ugliness; a sort of inverted
beauty; the poetry of dissonance and deformity; the proper music of
his nature being to curse, its proper laughter to snarl. Schlegel
finely compares his mind to a dark cave, into which the light of
knowledge falling n