Love Among the Ruins

(click to enlarge)

Edward Burne-Jones
(British, 1833-1898)
Love Among the Ruins, 1894
Oil on canvas

This painting takes it's title from Robert Browning's poem of the same name. The speaker in the poem muses on the ruins of an old palace and at the end of the poem concludes:

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.

 Christina Rossetti said the same thing more simply in her poem In The Willow Shade:

All things are vain that wax and wane,
For which we waste our breath;
Love only doth not wane and is not vain,
Love only outlives death.