Take away love and our earth is a tomb.

The line asserts that love is the animating principle of human life: without it, the world remains physically present but spiritually dead—like a tomb. Browning often treats love (romantic, moral, or divine) as the force that gives experience meaning and makes endurance possible amid suffering and loss. Read this way, the aphorism is less sentimental than existential: it proposes that what makes “earth” livable is not comfort or achievement but the capacity for attachment, compassion, and self-transcendence. Remove love, and existence becomes mere enclosure—life reduced to a kind of living burial.