"lazily alive,
Open-mouthed, ...
Letting all nature's loosely guarded motes
Settle and, slick, be swallowed."

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Hall Griffin, to state that an unpublished letter from Browning to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