Oscar Wilde was ill, "When you are not on your pedestal you are not interesting." Wilde blamed himself, though, for the ethical degradation of character that he allowed Douglas to bring about in him and took responsibility for his own fall, "I am here for having tried to put your father in prison." The first half concludes with Wilde forgiving Douglas, for his own sake as much as Douglas's. The second half of the letter traces Wilde's spiritual journey of redemption and fulfilment through his prison reading. He realised that his ordeal had filled his soul with the fruit of experience, however
Oscar Wilde and private lives had become sharply divided; in "De Profundis" he wrote to Douglas that "It was like feasting with panthers; the danger was half the excitement... I did not know that when they were to strike at me it was to be at another's piping and at another's pay." Douglas and some Oxford friends founded a journal, "The Chameleon", to which Wilde "sent a page of paradoxes originally destined for the "Saturday Review"". "" was to come under attack six months later at Wilde's trial, where he was forced to defend the magazine to which he had sent his