cities of the League assembled at Verona, are smitten out on the anvil
of Browning's imagination. Better still is the continuation of the same
scene in the third book, when the night has come, and the raging of the
people, reaching its height, declares war. Palma and Sordello, who are
in the palace looking on the square, lean out to see and hear. 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