either illuminates nor warms it, but only serves to
put in motion the poisonous vapours generated there.

Now it is by exhausting the resources of instruction on such a being
that his innate and essential deficiency is best shown. For, had he
the germs of a human soul, they must needs have been drawn forth by
the process that has made him a poet. The magical presence of spirits
has indeed cast into the caverns of his brain some faint reflection of
a better world, but without calling up any answering emotions or
aspirations; he having no susceptibilities to catch and take in the
epiphanies that throng his whereabout. So that, paradoxical as it may
seem, he exemplifies the two-fold triumph of art over nature, and of
nature over art; that is, art has triumphed in making him a poet, and
nature, in still keeping him from being a man; though he has enough of
the human in him to evince in a high degree the swelling of
intellectual pride.

But what is most remarkable of all in Caliban is the perfect
originality of his thoughts and manners. Though framed of grossness
and malignity, there is nothing vulgar or commonplace about him. His
whole character indeed is developed from within, not impressed from
without; the effect of Prospero's instructions having been to make him
all the more himself; and there being perhaps no soil in his nature
for conventional vices and knaveries to take root and grow in. Hence
the almost classic dignity of his behaviour compared with that of the
drunken sailors, who are little else than a sort of low, vulgar
conventionalities organized, and as such not less true to the life
than consistent with themselves. In his simplicity, indeed, he at
first mistakes them for gods who "bear celestial liquor," and they wax
merry enough at the "credulous monster"; but, in his vigour of thought
and purpose, he soon conceives such a scorn of their childish interest
in whatever trinkets and gewgaws meet their eye, as fairly drives off
his fit of intoxication; and the savage of the woods, half-human
though he be, seems nobility itself beside the savages of the city.

In fine, if Caliban is, so to speak, the organized sediment and dregs
of the place, from which all the finer spirit has been drawn off to
fashion the delicate Ariel, yet having some parts of a human mind
strangely interwoven with his structure; every thing about him, all
that he does and says, is suitable and correspondent to such a
constitution of natur