Summary
The statue of the Happy Prince stands high above the city, covered in gold leaf, with sapphire eyes and a ruby in his sword-hilt, and everyone admires him: a Town Councillor calls him as beautiful as a weathercock, a mother holds him up as a model to her crying son, and the Charity Children say he looks like an angel. One night a Swallow arrives. His friends left for Egypt six weeks ago, but he stayed behind for love of a Reed, then tired of her because she had no conversation and would not travel. He settles between the statue's feet and is soaked by drops falling from a clear sky: the Prince is weeping.
The Prince explains that he lived a life of pleasure in the Palace of Sans-Souci and now sees all the ugliness and misery of his city. He asks the Swallow to take the ruby to a seamstress who is embroidering passionflowers on a gown for a maid-of-honour while her feverish boy cries for oranges. The Swallow agrees to stay one night, lays the ruby beside her thimble and fans the boy's forehead, and afterwards feels strangely warm, because, the Prince tells him, he has done a good action. On the following nights the Prince has him pluck out both sapphire eyes. One goes to a young man in a garret, too cold and hungry to finish his play, who thinks it comes from an admirer; the other goes to a little match-girl whose father will beat her for losing her matches.
Now that the Prince is blind, the Swallow refuses to leave him. He tells him stories of the Nile and the Sphinx, but the Prince says that the suffering of men and women is more marvellous than anything, and sends him to look at the city. The Swallow sees the rich making merry while beggars sit at their gates and starving children stare into the black streets. On the Prince's orders he strips off the fine gold, leaf by leaf, and gives it to the poor, until the statue is dull and grey. Then the snow and frost come. Knowing he is dying, the Swallow kisses the Prince on the lips and falls dead at his feet, and the leaden heart cracks in two.
Next morning the Mayor finds the statue little better than a beggar, and the Town Councillors agree. They pull it down, the Art Professor declaring that since it is no longer beautiful it is no longer useful, and melt it in a furnace; the Councillors then quarrel over whose statue should replace it. The broken lead heart will not melt, so it is thrown on a dust-heap beside the dead Swallow. God asks one of His Angels for the two most precious things in the city, and the Angel brings the heart and the bird, which God receives into Paradise.