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Love has always been the chief business of my life, the only thing I have thought__o, felt__upremely worth while, and I don__ pretend that this experience was not succeeded by others. But at that time, I was innocent, with the innocence of ignorance, I didn__ know what was happening to me. I was without consciousness, that is to say, more utterly absorbed than was ever possible again. For after that first time there was always part of me standing aside, comparing, analysing, objecting: __s this real? Is this sincere?_ All the world of my predecessors was there before me, taking, as it were, the bread out of my mouth. Was this stab in my heart, this rapture, really mine or had I merely read about it? For every feeling, every vicissitude of my passion, there would spring into my mind a quotation from the poets. Shakespeare or Donne or Heine had the exact phrase for it. Comforting, perhaps, but enraging too. Nothing ever seemed spontaneously my own. As the blood dripped from the wound, there was always part of me to watch with a smile and a sneer: __iterature! Mere literature! Nothing to make a fuss about!_ And then I would add, __ut so Mercutio jested as he died!