“Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles Miles and miles On the solitary pastures where our sheep Half asleep Tinkle homeward through the twilight, stay or stop As they crop— Was the site once of a city great and gay (So they say) Of our country’s very capital, its prince Ages since Held his court in, gathered councils, wielding far Peace or war. And I know, while thus the quiet-coloured eve Smiles to leave To their folding, all our many-tinkling fleece In such peace, And the slopes and rills in undistinguished gray Melt away— That a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair Waits me there In the turret whence the charioteers caught soul For the goal, When the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, dumb Till I come. ... In one year they sent a million fighters forth South and North, And they built their gods a brazen pillar high As the sky, Yet reserved a thousand chariots in full force— Gold of course. Oh heart! Oh blood that freezes, blood that burns! Earth’s returns For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin! Shut them in, With their triumphs and their glories and the rest! Love is best.” III “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_, _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 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 and use their service, Speak from every mouth,—the speech a poem.”