He stood and watched the cobbler at his trade,
The man who slices lemons into drink,
The coffee-roaster's brazier, and the boys
That volunteer to help him turn its winch.
He glanced o'er books on stalls with half an eye,
And fly-leaf ballads on the vendor's string,
And broad-edged bold-print posters by the wall.
He took such cognisance of man and things,
If any beat a horse you felt he saw;
If any cursed a woman, he took note;
Yet stared at nobody, you stared at him,
And found, less to your pleasure than surprise,
He seemed to know you and expect as much.

That is the artist's way. 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. There are numbers of such men as the Duke and such women as
the Duchess in our midst. Both are, however, drawn with mastery.
Browning has rarely done his work with more insight, with greater
keenness of portraiture, with happier brevity and selection. As in _The
Flight of the Duchess_, untoward fate has bound together two
temperaments sure to clash with each other--and no gipsy comes to
deliver the woman in this case. The man's nature kills her. It happens
every day. The Renaissance society may have built up more men of this
type than ours, but they are not peculiar to it.

Germany, not Italy, is, I think, the country in which Browning intended
to place two other poems which belong to the time of the
Renaissance--_Johannes Agricola in Meditation_ and _A Grammarian's
Funeral_. Their note is as different from that of the Italian poems as
the national temper of Germany is from that of Italy. They have no sense
of beauty for beauty's sake alone. Their atmosphere is not soft or gay
but somewhat stern. The logical arrangement of them is less one of
feeling than of thought. There is a stronger manhood in them, a grimmer
view of life. The sense of duty to God and Man, but little represented
in the Italian