ble world
alone exists," endowed with all the Greek sensuousness and love of
plastic beauty; a pagan, like Nietzsche and Gautier, wholly out of
sympathy with Christianity, one of "the Confraternity of the faithless
who _cannot_ believe,"[5] to whom a sense of sin and repentance are
symptoms of weakness and disease.

Oscar used often to say that the chief pleasure he had in visiting
Rome was to find the Greek gods and the heroes and heroines of Greek
story throned in the Vatican. He preferred Niobe to the Mater Dolorosa
and Helen to both; the worship of sorrow must give place, he declared,
to the worship of the beautiful.

Another dominant characteristic of the young man may here find its
place.

While still at Oxford his tastes--the bent of his mind, and his
temperament--were beginning to outline his future. He spent his
vacations in Dublin and always called upon his old school friend
Edward Sullivan in his rooms at Trinity. Sullivan relates that when
they met Oscar used to be full of his occasional visits to London and
could talk of nothing but the impression made upon him by plays and
players. From youth on the theatre drew him irresistibly; he had not
only all the vanity of the actor; but what might be called the born
dramatist's love for the varied life of the stage--its paintings,
costumings, rhetoric--and above all the touch of emphasis natural to
it which gives such opportunity for humorous exaggeration.

"I remember him telling me," Sullivan writes, "about Irving's
'Macbeth,' which made a great impression on him; he was fascinated by
it. He feared, however, that the public might be similarly affected--a
thing which, he declared, would destroy his enjoyment of an
extraordinary performance." He admired Miss Ellen Terry, too,
extravagantly, as he admired Marion Terry, Mrs. Langtry, and Mary
Anderson later.

The death of Sir William Wilde put an end to the family life in
Dublin, and set the survivors free. Lady Wilde had lost her husband
and her only daughter in Merrion Square: the house was full of sad
memories to her, she was eager to leave it all and settle in London.

The _Requiescat_ in Oscar's first book of poems was written in memory
of this sister who died in her teens, whom he likened to "a ray of
sunshine dancing about the house." He took his vocation seriously even
in youth: he felt that he should sing his sorrow, give record of
whatever happened to him in life. But he found no new word for his
b