“Love is best!” That is one of the cardinal points of Browning’s creed. He repeats it in a hundred ways: tragically in A Blot in the ’Scutcheon; sentimentally in A Lover’s Quarrel, Two in the Campagna,
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 The Last Ride Together; heroically in Colombe’s Birthday; in the form of a paradox in The Statue and the Bust; as a personal experience in By the Fireside, One Word More, and at the end of the prelude to The Ring and the Book.
“For life, with all it yields of joy and woe
And hope and fear, ...
Is just our chance o’ the prize of learning love.”
But it must be confessed that he does not often say it as clearly, as quietly, as beautifully as in Love Among the Ruins. For his chosen method is dramatic and his natural manner is psychological. So ardently does he follow this method, so entirely does he give himself up to this manner that his style
“is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.”
In the dedicatory note to Sordello, written in 1863, he says “My stress lay in the incidents in the development of a soul; little else is worth study.” He felt intensely
“How the world is made for each of us!
How all we perceive and know in it
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Tends to some moment’s product thus,
When a soul declares itself—to wit,
By its fruit, the thing it does!”
In One Word More he describes his own poetry with keen insight:
“Love, you saw me gather men and women,
Live or dead or fashioned by my fancy,
Enter each and all............