The Happy Prince and Other Tales: with original illustrations

High above a city stands an ornate statue of the Happy Prince, recently deceased. He oversees the town and is pained by the suffering of his people. One night, a Swallow who had not gone to Egypt with his flock for the winter because he was pursuing a beautiful Reed arrives in the city and rests on the Happy Prince's statue. The Swallow notices the Prince is crying, and the Prince explains that during his lifetime, he had lived in a palace devoid of misery, and therefore had never experienced sorrow. Now, though, he can see the suffering of his people. He then asks the Swallow to distribute the gemstones and gold leaf from his form to various families in need. The Swallow loves the Prince and decides to stay. By the time winter arrives, though, the Happy Prince is stripped of all his beauty while the Swallow dies of the harsh cold. As a result, the Happy Prince's lead heart breaks. When the Mayor finds the statue in such a decrepit state, he decides to take it down, melt it, and make an ornate statue of himself. The lead heart and the dead swallow are discarded like they are nothing, but when God tells an Angel to bring Him the two most precious things in the city, the Angel brings him the dead bird and the lead heart.

Oscar Wilde was born on October 16, 1854, in Dublin, Ireland. He was educated at Trinity College in Dublin and at Magdalen College, Oxford, and settled in London, where he married Constance Lloyd in 1884. In the literary world of Victorian London, Wilde fell in with an artistic crowd that included W. B. Yeats, the great Irish poet, and Lillie Langtry, mistress to the Prince of Wales. A great conversationalist and a famous wit, Wilde began by publishing mediocre poetry but soon achieved widespread fame for his comic plays. The first, Vera; or, The Nihilists, was published in 1880. Wilde followed this work with Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and his most famous play, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Although these plays relied upon relatively simple and familiar plots, they rose well above convention with their brilliant dialogue and biting satire.