Page:Wilde - De profundis, 1915.djvu/135

Rh for such as they. They never die. Horatio, who in order to 'report Hamlet and his cause aright to the unsatisfied,'

dies, though not before an audience, and leaves no brother. But Guildenstern and Rosencrantz are as immortal as Angelo and Tartuffe, and should rank with them. They are what modern life has contributed to the antique ideal of friendship. He who writes a new De Amicitia must find a niche for them, and praise them in Tusculan prose. They are types fixed for all time. To censure them would show 'a lack of appreciation.' They are merely out of their sphere: that is all. In sublimity of soul there is no contagion. High thoughts and high emotions are by their very existence isolated.

I am to be released, if all goes well with me, towards the end of May, and hope to go at once to some little seaside village abroad with R and M.

The sea, as Euripides says in one of his plays