always a tonic to my brain and spiritual nature. With
good reason has this poem been termed "extraordinary;" and that thinker
and critic, James Mudge, has named it "the finest illustration of
grotesque art in the language."

The picture of Caliban sprawling in the ooze, brute instincts regnant,
is complete and admirable. Stealing time from service to be truant
(seeing Prospero sleeps), he gives him over to pure animal enjoyment,
when, on a sudden, from the cavern where he lies,

"He looks out o'er yon sea which sunbeams cross
And recross till they weave a spider web,
Meshes of fire,
And talks to his own self howe'er he please,
Touching that other whom his dam called God;"

but talks of God, not as a promise of a better life, but purely of an
evil mind,

"Because to talk about Him vexes Prospero!
And it is good to cheat the pair [Miranda and
Prospero], and gibe,
Letting the rank tongue blossom into speech."

What a motive for thinking on the august God! He now addresses himself
to the conceiving of a divinity. He thrusts his mother's beliefs aside
rudely, as a beast does the flags that stand along its way in making
journey to the stream to slake its thirst. He is grossly
self-sufficient. He is boor and fool conjoined. Where wise men and
angels would move with reverent tread and forehead bent to earth, he
walks erect, unhumbled; nay, without a sense of worship. How could he
or another find God so? The mood of prayer is the mood of finding God.
Who seeks Him must seek with thought aflame with love. Caliban's
reasoning ambles like a drunkard staggering home from late debauch.
His grossness shames us. And yet were he only Caliban, and if he were
all alone, we could forget his maudlin speech--but he is more. He is a
voice of our own era. His babblings are not more crude and
irreverential than much that passes for profound thinking. Nay,
Caliban is our contemporaneous shame. He asserts (he does not
think--he asserts, settles questions with a word) that Setebos created
not all things--the world and sun--

"But not the stars; the stars came otherwise;"

and this goodly frame of ocean and of sky and earth came of Setebos.

"Being ill at ease,
He hated that he can not change his cold
Nor cure its ache."

His god is selfishness, operating on a huge scale. But more, he

"Made all we see and us in spite: how else?
But did in envy, listlessness, or sport