This theory of creation is derived from Caliban's own experience. In like manner, when he has got drunk on fermented fruits, and feels he would like to fly, he pinches up a clay bird, and sends it into the air; and if its leg snaps off, and it entreats him to stop the smarting, or make the leg grow again, he may give it two more, or he may break off the remaining one; just to show the thing that he can do with it what he likes.
He also presumes that Setebos is envious, because _he_ is so; as for instance: if he made a pipe to catch birds with, and the pipe boasted: "_I_ catch the birds. _I_ make a cry which my maker can't make unless he blows through me," he would smash it on the spot.
For the rest he imagines that Setebos, like himself, is neither kind nor cruel, but simply acts on all possible occasions as his fancy prompts him. The one thing which would arouse his own hostility, and therefore that of Setebos, would be that any creature should think he is ever prompted by anything else; or that his adopting a certain course one day would be a reason for following it on the next.
Guided by these analogies--which he illustrates with much quaintness and variety--Caliban humours Setebos, always pretending to be envious of him, and never allowing himself to seem too happy. He moans in the sunlight, gets under holes to laugh, and only ventures to think aloud, when out of sight and hearing, as he is at the present moment. Thus sheltered, however, he makes too free with his tongue. He risks the expression of a hope that old age, or the Quiet, will some day make an end of his Creator, whom he loves none the better for being so like himself. And in another moment he is crouching in abject fear: for an awful thunderstorm has broken out. "That raven scudding away 'has told him all.'"
"Lo! 'Lieth flat and loveth Setebos!" (vol. vii. p. 161.)
and will do anything to please him so that he escape this time.
The most impressive of the dramatic monologues, "A Death in the Desert," detaches itself from this double group. It is contemplative in tone, but inspired by a formed conviction, and, dramatically at least, by an instructive purpose; and thus becomes the centre of another small division of Mr. Browning's poems, which for want of a less ugly and hackneyed word we may call "didactic."