Had there been nothing in your heart to cry out against so vulgar a sacrilege, you might at least have remembered the sonnet he wrote who saw with such sorrow and scorn the letters of John Keats sold by public auction in London, and have understood at last the real meaning of my lines: 

          “...  I think they love not art
    Who break the crystal of a poet’s heart
    That small and sickly eyes may glare or gloat.”

One cannot always keep an adder in one’s breast to feed on one, nor rise up every night to sow thorns in the garden of one’s soul.

I cannot allow you to go through life bearing in your heart the burden of having ruined a man like me.

Does it ever occur to you what an awful position I would have been in if, for the last two years, during my appalling sentence, I had been dependent on you as a friend?  Do you ever think of that?  Do you ever feel any gratitude to those who by kindness without stint, devotion without limit, cheerfulness and joy in giving, have lightened my black burden for me, have arranged my future life for me, have visited me again and again, have written to me beautiful and sympathetic letters, have managed my affairs for me, have stood by me in the teeth of obloquy, taunt, open sneer or insult even?  I thank God every day that he gave me friends other than you.  I owe everything to them.  The very books in my cell are paid for by Robbie out of his pocket money.  From the same source[55] are to come clothes for me when I am released.  I am not ashamed of taking a thing that is given by love and affection.  I am proud of it.  But do you ever think of what friends such as More Adey, Robbie, Robert Sherard, Frank Harris, and Arthur Clifton have been to me in giving me comfort, help, affection, sympathy and the like?...

I know that your mother, Lady Queensberry, puts the blame on me.  I hear of it, not from people who know you, but from people who do not know you, and do not desire to know you.  I hear of it often.  She talks of the influence of an elder over a younger man, for instance.  It is one of her favourite attitudes towards the question, as it is always a successful appeal to popular prejudice and ignorance.  I need not ask you what influence I had over you.  You know I had none.

It was one of your frequent boasts that I had none, the only one indeed, that was well founded.  What was there, as a mere matter of fact, in you that I could influence?  Your brain?  It was undeveloped.  Your imagination?  It was dead.  Your heart?  It was not yet born.  Of all the people who have ever crossed my life, you were the one, and the only one, I was unable in any way to influence in any direction.

I waited month after month to hear from you.  Even if I had not been waiting but had shut the doors against you, you should have remembered that no one can possibly shut the doors against love forever.  The unjust judge in the gospels rises up at length to give a just decision because justice comes daily knocking at his door:  and at night time the friend, in whose heart there is no real friendship, yields at length to his friend “because of his importunity.”  There is no prison in any world into which love cannot force an entrance.  If you did not understand that, you did not understand anything about love at all....