One word more must be said about the way a great number of these poems arose.  They leaped up in his imagination full-clad and finished at a single touch from the outside. Caliban upon Setebos took its rise from a text in the Bible which darted into his mind as he read the Tempest. Cleon arose as he read that verse in St. Paul’s speech at Athens, “As certain also of your own poets have said.”  I fancy that An Epistle of Karshish was born one day when he read those two stanzas in In Memoriam about Lazarus, and imagined how the subject would come to him. Fra Lippo Lippi slipped into his mind one day at the Belle Arti at Florence as he stood before the picture described in the poem, and walked afterwards at night through the streets of Florence.  These fine things are born in a moment, and come into our world from poet, painter, and musician, full-grown; built, like Aladdin’s palace, with all their jewels, in a single night.  They are inexplicable by any scientific explanation, as inexplicable as genius itself.  When have the hereditarians explained Shakespeare, Mozart, Turner?  When has the science of the world explained the birth of a lyric of Burns, a song of Beethoven’s, or a drawing of Raffaelle?  Let these gentlemen veil their eyes, and confess their inability to explain the facts.  For it is fact they touch.  “Full fathom five thy father lies”—­that song of Shakespeare exists.  The overture to Don Giovanni is a reality.  We can see the Bacchus and Ariadne at the National Gallery and the Theseus at the Museum.  These are facts; but they are a million million miles beyond the grasp of any science.  Nay, the very smallest things of their kind, the slightest water-colour sketch of Turner, a half-finished clay sketch of Donatello, the little song done in the corner of a provincial paper by a working clerk in a true poetic hour, are not to be fathomed by the most far-descending plummet of the scientific understanding.  These things are in that superphysical world into which, however closely he saw and dealt with his characters in the world of the senses, the conscience, or the understanding, Browning led them all at last.

The first of these poems is Natural Theology on the Island; or, Caliban upon Setebos.  Caliban, with the instincts and intelligence of an early savage, has, in an hour of holiday, set himself to conceive what Setebos, his mother’s god, is like in character.  He talks out the question with himself, and because he is in a vague fear lest Setebos, hearing him soliloquise about him, should feel insulted and swing a thunder-bolt at him, he not only hides himself in the earth, but speaks in the third person, as if it was not he that spoke; hoping in that fashion to trick his God.

Browning, conceiving in himself the mind and temper of an honest, earthly, imaginative savage—­who is developed far enough to build nature-myths in their coarse early forms—­architectures the character of Setebos out of the habits, caprices, fancies, likes and dislikes, and thoughts of Caliban; and an excellent piece of penetrative imagination it is.  Browning has done nothing better, though he has done as well.