On the black balcony beneath them, in the still air, amid a gush of torch-fire, the grey-haired counsellors harangue the people; then Sea-like that people surging to and fro Shouted, "Hale forth the carroch--trumpets, ho, A flourish! Run it in the ancient grooves! Back from the bell! Hammer--that whom behoves May hear the League is up!" Then who will may read the dazzling account of the streets of Ferrara thick with corpses; of Padua, of Bassano streaming blood; of the wells chokeful of carrion, of him who catches in his spur, as he is kicking his feet when he sits on the well and singing, his own mother's face by the grey hair; of the sack of Vicenza in the fourth book; of the procession of the envoys of the League through the streets of Ferrara, with ensigns, war-cars and clanging bells; of the wandering of Sordello at night through the squares blazing with fires, and the soldiers camped around them singing and shouting; of his solitary silent thinking contrasted with their noise and action--and he who reads will know, as if he lived in them, the fierce Italian towns of the thirteenth century.
Nor is his power less when he describes the solitary silent places of mediaeval castles, palaces, and their rooms; of the long, statue-haunted, cypress-avenued gardens, a waste of flowers and wild undergrowth.

We wander, room by room, through Adelaide's castle at Goito, we see every beam in the ceiling, every figure on the tapestry; we walk with Browning through the dark passages into the dim-lighted chambers of the town palace at Verona, and hang over its balconies; we know the gardens at Goito, and the lonely woods; and we keep pace with Sordello through those desolate paths and ilex-groves, past the fountains lost in the wilderness of foliage, climbing from terrace to terrace where the broken statues, swarming with wasps, gleam among the leering aloes and the undergrowth, in the garden that Salinguerra made for his Sicilian wife at Ferrara.

The words seem as it were to flare the ancient places out before the eyes.
Mixed up with all this painting of towns, castles and gardens there is some natural description.

Browning endeavours, it is plain, to keep that within the mediaeval sentiment.

But that he should succeed in that was impossible.