Love Quote by Richard Le Gallienne

A poet’s eyelid flickers here between wonder and dread: the lab as a modern genie, equally fluent in love letters and death warrants. Le Gallienne frames science not as neutral progress but as a service industry for desire, with “whim or emergency” collapsing the moral distance between indulgence and necessity. That pairing is the trick. A whim sounds harmless, even silly; an emergency sounds righteous. Put them side by side and you feel how quickly the language of need can launder appetites into imperatives.

“Romance” is doing double duty. It’s the sentimental, consumer-facing promise of novelty, but also the older Romantic aura of mystery and transcendence. The laboratory, supposedly the anti-romantic domain of measurement, becomes the new supplier of enchantment. Yet the enchantment is mass-produced, and that’s where the bite lands: romance is no longer a human art so much as a deliverable.

The closing image lands like a snapped wire: “a torpedo or a toy.” Same pipeline, different packaging. The phrase “gratify mankind” is gently acidic, suggesting that what’s being served isn’t wisdom or emancipation but gratification - pleasure, power, distraction. Written in a world jolted by industrialized warfare and dazzled by modern conveniences, the line captures an early 20th-century vertigo: technology’s indifference to ends. The lab doesn’t choose; it fulfills. The question Le Gallienne leaves hanging is whether our desires deserve that level of obedience.