After it, who knows? A pall of burning lime, a barren spot where might be roses. But he lives an hundred times life's last moments, and multiplies the agony of the man who dies in the hearts of all those others who feel with him how frail is their own perilous hold. * * * * * Wilde's two letters to The Daily Chronicle, 'On the Case of Warder Martin,' and 'On Prison Reform,' show just such a change in his attitude towards social questions as that which the ballad shows in his attitude towards poetry. I have not, so far, said anything of _The Soul of Man under Socialism_, and I left undiscussed the consciousness of social problems that is apparent in some of the fairy tales. It seemed better to consider these things later in the book, when it should be possible to compare his attitudes towards the social system before and after he had come in conflict with it. At the beginning of his career he had written republican poetry, but had prefaced it with the avowal:-- "Not that I love thy children, whose dull eyes See nothing save their own unlovely woe, Whose minds know nothing, nothing care to know,-- But that the roar of thy Democracies, Thy reigns of Terror, thy great Anarchies, Mirror my wildest passions like the sea And give my rage a brother----!" But for this, he says, nations might be wronged and he remain unmoved, "... and yet, and yet, These Christs that die upon the barricades, God knows it I am with them, in some things."