Like Caliban, who also finds the anteater an instructive symbol, he sees “the supernatural” everywhere, and everywhere concerned with himself.  But Caliban’s religion of terror, cunning, and cajolery is more estimable than Sludge’s business-like faith in the virtue of wares for which he finds so profitable a market, and which he gets on such easy terms.  Caliban tremblingly does his best to hitch his waggon to Setebos’s star—­when Setebos is looking; Sludge is convinced that the stars are once for all hitched to his waggon; that heaven is occupied in catering for his appetite and becoming an accomplice in his sins.  Sludge’s spiritual world was genuine for him, but it had nothing but the name in common with that of the poet of Ben Ezra, and of the Epilogue which immediately follows.[44]

[Footnote 44:  The foregoing account assumes that the poem was not written, as is commonly supposed, in Florence in 1859-60, but after his settlement in London.  The only ground for the current view is Mrs Browning’s mention of his having been “working at a long poem” that winter (Letters, May 18, 1860).  I am enabled, by the kindness of Prof.  Hall Griffin, to state that an unpublished letter from Browning to Buchanan in 1871 shows this “long poem” to have been one on Napoleon III. (cf. above, p. 90).  Some of it probably appears in Hohenstiel Schwangau.]

This Epilogue is one of the few utterances in which Browning draws the ambiguous dramatic veil from his personal faith.  That he should choose this moment of parting with the reader for such a confession confirms one’s impression that the focus of his interest in poetry now, more than ever before, lay among those problems of life and death, of God and man, to which nearly all the finest work of this collection is devoted.  Far more emphatically than in the analogous Christmas-Eve, Browning resolves not only the negations of critical scholarship but the dogmatic affirmations of the Churches into symptoms of immaturity in the understanding of spiritual things; in the knowledge how heaven’s high with earth’s low should intertwine.  The third speaker voices the manifold protest of the nineteenth century against all theologies built upon an aloofness of the divine and human, whether the aloof God could be reached by special processes and ceremonies, or whether he was a bare abstraction, whose “pale bliss” never thrilled in response to human hearts.  The best comment upon his faith is the saying of Meredith, “The fact that character can be and is developed by the clash of circumstances is to me a warrant for infinite hope."[45] Only, for Browning, that “infinite hope” translates itself into a sense of present divine energies bending all the clashing circumstance to its benign end, till the walls of the world take on the semblance of the shattered Temple, and the crowded life within them the semblance of the seemingly vanished Face, which

        “far from vanish, rather grows,
      Or decomposes but to recompose,
      Become my universe that feels and knows."[46]