It was Browning's way.

He is describing himself.

In that fashion he roamed through Venice or Florence, stopping every moment, attracted by the smallest thing, finding a poem in everything, lost in himself yet seeing all that surrounded him, isolated in thinking, different from and yet like the rest of the world.
Another poem--_My Last Duchess_--must be mentioned.

It is plainly placed in the midst of the period of the Renaissance by the word _Ferrara_, which is added to its title.

But it is rather a picture of two temperaments which may exist in any cultivated society, and at any modern time.