I will not stop here to enquire whether he found later the consolation he so much desired, a haven of peace in the friendship of the aristocratic adolescent, who had unwittingly caused him to become cast-a-way. It is highly probable that the bitter words which André Gide heard him utter, referred to that unfortunate intimacy: "No, he does not understand me; he can no longer understand me. I repeat to him in each letter; we can no more follow together the same path; you have yours, and it is certainly beautiful; and I have mine. His path is the path of Alcibiade, whilst mine henceforth must be that of St. Francis of Assisi."
His last most important work in prose: _De Profundis_, which reveals him to us under an entirely different aspect, although, practically always the same man, shows that he is still engrossed with the perpetual love of attitudinizing, dreaming perhaps, that in spite of his sorrow and repentance, he will be able to take up again and sing, although in an humbler tone, the pagan hymn that had been strangled in his throat. In this connection, we cannot help thinking of the gesture of the great Talma, who whilst he lay a-dying, although he knew it not, took the pendant skin of his thin neck, between his fingers, and said to those who stood around: "Here is something which would suit finely to make up a visage for an old Tiberius."
It seems to us that the chief characteristic of Wilde's book is not so much its admirable accent as its subtle irony, through which there seems to thrill the reply of Destiny to the haughty resolutions that he had undertaken. It is as though Death itself rose up from each page to sneer and chuckle at the master-singer; and few things are more bitter on the part of this poet--who had with his own hands ensepulchred himself as a willing holocaust to the deceitful gods of factitious Art,--than the constant appeals that he makes to Nature. The song no longer rings with the old regal note; there is none of the trepidating joy of a Whitman, or the yielding sweetness of an Emerson; our ear detects only the melopoeia of a heart which had been wounded in its innermost recess.
"_I tremble with pleasure when I think that on the very day of my leaving prison both the laburnum and the lilac will be blooming in the gardens, and that I shall see the wind stir into restless beauty the swaying gold of the one, and make the other toss the pale purple of its plumes so that all the air shall be Arabia for me._"[12]