As wicked dew as e’er my mother brushed
    With raven’s feather from unwholesome fen
    Drop on you both; a south-west blow on you
    And blister you all o’er.

Stephano and Trinculo, vulgar products of civilisation, could never have said that.  Moreover, Shakespeare’s Caliban, like Browning’s, has the poetry of the earth-man in him.  When Ariel plays, Trinculo and Stephano think it must be the devil, and Trinculo is afraid:  but Caliban loves and enjoys the music for itself: 

    Be not afear’d; the isle is full of noises,
    Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. 
    Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
    Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices
    That, if I then had waked after long sleep. 
    Will make me sleep again.

Stephano answers, like a modern millionaire: 

    This will prove a brave kingdom for me, where I shall have
    my music for nothing.

Browning’s Caliban is also something of a poet, and loves the Nature of whom he is a child.  We are not surprised when he

                looks out o’er yon sea which sunbeams cross
    And recross till they weave a spider web
    (Meshes of fire some great fish breaks at times)

though the phrase is full of a poet’s imagination, for so the living earth would see and feel the sea.  It belongs also to Caliban’s nearness to the earth that he should have the keenest of eyes for animals, and that poetic pleasure in watching their life which, having seen them vividly, could describe them vividly.  I quote one example from the poem; there are many others: 

    ’Thinketh, He made thereat the sun, this isle,
    Trees and the fowls here, beast and creeping thing. 
    Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech;
    Yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam,
    That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown
    He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye
    By moonlight; and the pie with the long tongue
    That pricks deep into oakwarts for a worm,
    And says a plain word when she finds her prize,
    But will not eat the ants; the ants themselves
    That build a wall of seeds and settled stalks
    About their hole—­

There are two more remarks to make about this poem.  First, that Browning makes Caliban create a dramatic world in which Miranda, Ariel, and he himself play their parts, and in which he assumes the part of Prosper.  That is, Caliban invents a new world out of the persons he knows, but different from them, and a second self outside himself.  No lower animal has ever conceived of such a creation.  Secondly, Browning makes Caliban, in order to exercise his wit and his sense of what is beautiful, fall to making something—­a bird, an insect, or a building which he ornaments, which satisfies him for a time, and which he then destroys to make a better.  This is art in its