'The Happy Prince' by Oscar Wilde is a beautiful, deeply moving short story from the Class 9 English Moments textbook. It tells the story of a magnificent golden statue and a small swallow who sacrifice everything to help the poor.
Author: Oscar Wilde (famous Irish writer).
The Three Gifts: The ruby (to the seamstress), the sapphires (to the playwright and the match girl), the gold leaves (to the poor children).
The Swallow's Sacrifice: He gave up his trip to Egypt and eventually his life.
God's Verdict: He declared the swallow and the Prince's heart as the two most precious things in the city.
The Happy Prince was a magnificent statue of a prince covered in gold leaf, with sapphires for eyes and a great ruby in his sword. He stood high above the city on a tall column. During his life, he had lived in a palace where sorrow was not allowed, so he knew nothing of suffering.
The swallow was flying to Egypt to join his friends for winter. He rested at the statue's feet for the night. The Prince asked him to carry his ruby to a poor seamstress whose child was sick. The swallow, moved by compassion, agreed and kept helping the Prince deliver his jewels and gold to the city's poor.
The swallow stayed too long helping the Prince and died of the cold. The leaden heart of the Prince broke in two. The mayor, finding the statue ugly without gold and jewels, had it melted down. God asked the angel to bring the two most precious things — the broken heart and the dead swallow — to paradise.
The moral is that true love, compassion, and selfless sacrifice are the most valuable things in the world, more precious than gold or jewels.
Because they represented the highest form of love — pure, selfless sacrifice without any expectation of reward.
He gave away his ruby sword-hilt, his two sapphire eyes, and all the gold leaf covering his body to the poor and suffering people of the city.
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