Life & Wisdom Quote by Richard Le Gallienne

Le Gallienne builds a philosophy of impermanence that refuses the comfort of grand doctrine and instead leans on sensation: a song dissolving midair, flowers that don’t even get to keep their season, snow that melts into memory, winds and streams that can’t be held, faces that vanish no matter how fiercely they’re loved. The repeated phrase “vanishing road” is the engine here. A road is supposed to lead somewhere; his road erases itself underfoot. That small sabotage turns a pastoral catalog into an existential trapdoor.

The intent isn’t simply to mourn transience but to make it intimate and collective. “We are all” levels the room; the speaker isn’t posing as a solitary melancholic but naming a shared condition. The syntax treads forward with steady, almost processional rhythm, as if the sentence itself is walking - and its length enacts what it describes: movement you can’t stop, a breath that has to keep going until it runs out.

Context matters: Le Gallienne, an aesthete shaped by late-Victorian lyricism and the fin-de-siecle taste for beauty under threat, writes from a culture watching certainties fray - industrial modernity, shifting social orders, and later the shock of world war. The subtext is that permanence is the real illusion, and art’s job isn’t to rescue us from loss but to tune our attention to it. Even “beloved faces” are placed beside weather and water, not to cheapen love but to admit its merciless continuity with nature. The consolation, if there is one, is that the disappearing is also the singing.