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 neither 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.