Caliban upon Setebos; or, Natural Theology In the Island,[37] is more of a creation, and a much greater poem, than A Death in the Desert.  It is sometimes forgotten that the grotesque has its own region in art.  The region of the grotesque has been well defined, in connection with this poem, in a paper read by Mr. Cotter Morison before the Browning Society.  “Its proper province,” he writes, “would seem to be the exhibition of fanciful power by the artist; not beauty or truth in the literal sense at all, but inventive affluence of unreal yet absurdly comic forms, with just a flavour of the terrible added, to give a grim dignity, and save from the triviality of caricature."[38] With the exception of The Heretic’s Tragedy, Caliban upon Setebos is probably the finest piece of grotesque art in the language.  Browning’s Caliban, unlike Shakespeare’s, has no active part to play:  if he has ever seen Stephano and Trinculo, he has forgotten it.  He simply sprawls on the ground “now that the heat of day is best,” and expounds for himself, for his own edification, his system of Natural Theology.  I think Huxley has said that the poem is a truly scientific representation of the development of religious ideas in primitive man.  It needed the subtlest of poets to apprehend and interpret the undeveloped ideas and sensations of a rudimentary and transitionally human creature like Caliban, to turn his dumb stirrings of quaint fancies into words, and to do all this without a discord.  The finest poetical effect is in the close:  it is indeed one of the finest effects, climaxes, surprises, in literature.  Caliban has been venturing to talk rather disrespectfully of his God; believing himself overlooked, he has allowed himself to speak out his mind on religious questions.  He chuckles to himself in safe self-complacency.  All at once—­

      “What, what?  A curtain o’er the world at once! 
      Crickets stop hissing; not a bird—­or, yes,
      There scuds His raven that hath told Him all! 
      It was fool’s play, this prattling!  Ha!  The wind
      Shoulders the pillared dust, death’s house o’ the move,
      And fast invading fires begin!  White blaze—­
      A tree’s head snaps—­and there, there, there, there, there,
      His thunder follows!  Fool to jibe at Him! 
      Lo!  ’Lieth flat and loveth Setebos! 
      ’Maketh his teeth meet through his upper lip,
      Will let those quails fly, will not eat this month
      One little mess of whelks, so he may ’scape!”

Mr. Sludge, “The Medium" is equally remote from both the other poems in blank verse.  It is a humorous and realistic tale of modern spiritualism, suggested, it is said, by the life and adventures of the American medium, Home.  Like Bishop Blougram, it is at once an exposure and an apologia.  As a piece of analytic portraiture it would be difficult to surpass; and it is certainly a fault on the right