"Love is all" might have served as the text for the whole volume of Browning's love-poetry; but the text is wrought out with an amazingly acute vision for all the things which are not love.

"Love triumphing over the world" might have been the motto for most of the love-poems in _Men and Women_; but some would have had to be assigned to the opposite rubric, "The world triumphing over love." Sometimes Love's triumph is, for Browning, the rapture of complete union, for which all outer things exist only by subduing themselves to its mood and taking its hue; sometimes it is the more ascetic and spiritual triumph of an unrequited lover in the lonely glory of his love.
The triumph of Browning's united lovers has often a superb Elizabethan note of defiance.

Passion obliterates for them the past and throws a mystically hued veil over Nature.

The gentle Romantic sentiments hardly touch the fresh springs of their emotion.

They may meet and woo "among the ruins," as Coleridge met and wooed his Genevieve "beside the ruined tower"; but their song does not, like his, "suit well that ruin old and hoary," but, on the contrary, tramples with gay scorn upon the lingering memories of the ruined city,--a faded pageant yoked to its triumphal car.
"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." Another lover, in _My Star_, pours lyric disdain upon his friends for whose purblind common-sense vision the star which to him "dartled red and blue," now a bird, now a flower, was just--a star.