How love might be, hath been indeed, and is."

Nowhere, either, do we see more clearly how this master-conception of
his won control of his reasoning powers, framing specious ladders to
conclusions towards which his whole nature yearned, but which his vision
of the world did not uniformly bear out. Man loved, and God would not be
above man if He did not also love. The horrible spectre of a God who has
power without love never ceased to lurk in the background of Browning's
thought, and he strove with all his resources of dialectic and poetry to
exorcise it. And no wonder. For a loving God was the very keystone of
Browning's scheme of life and of the world, and its withdrawal would
have meant for him the collapse of the whole structure.

It is no accident that the _Death in the Desert_ is followed immediately
by a theological study in a very different key, _Caliban upon Setebos_.
For in this brilliantly original "dramatic monologue" Caliban--the
"savage man"--appears "mooting the point 'What is God?'" and
constructing his answer frankly from his own nature. It was quite in
Browning's way to take a humorous delight in imagining grotesque
parallels to ideas and processes in which he profoundly believed; a
proclivity aided by the curious subtle relation between his grotesquerie
and his seriousness, which makes _Pacchiarotto_, for instance, closely
similar in effect to parts of _Christmas-Eve_. Browning is one of three
or four sons of the nineteenth century who dared to fill in the
outlines, or to complete the half-told tale, of Shakespeare's
Caliban.[43] Kenan's hero is the quondam disciple of Stephano and
Trinculo, finished and matured in the corrupt mob-politics of Europe; a
caustic symbol of democracy, as Renan saw it, alternately trampling on
and patronising culture. Browning's Caliban is far truer to
Shakespeare's conception; he is the Caliban of Shakespeare, not