Finally, and certainly most important in his own eyes, the book contains a record of the love affair which, in a sense, balanced the abortive religious experience. He fell in love with an actress, who found him quite delightful, did not love him, let him love her for a summer, and then told him not to waste his time. Wilde, as a young poet, probably came to town prepared to fall in love, just as he had gone to Italy prepared to be converted to Catholicism. His actress may have recognized that this was so, and been ready, within reason, to play the part assigned her. Through Wilde's magnificent phrasing there appears a replica of the love affairs of how many boys with women wiser than themselves and not without a sense of humour. "Ah! hadst thou liked me less and loved me more, Through all these summer days of joy and rain, I had not now been sorrow's heritor, Or stood a lackey in the House of Pain." But he had not to grumble: he had been able to love her learnedly in sonnets and gallantly in serenades. He had-- "Stood face to face with Beauty, known indeed The Love which moves the Sun and all the Stars!" That was really all that he had needed, but an awakening critical faculty told him that he won more pain than poetry. "Had my lips been smitten into music by the kisses that but made them bleed, You had walked with Bice and the angels on that verdant and enamelled mead." He was disappointed, but the fault was not his, not his lady's, but due only to impatience. He who wills to love has rhetoric in his feeling, and, though he wrote-- "I have made my choice, have lived my poems, and, though youth is gone in wasted days, I have found the lover's crown of myrtle better than the poet's crown of bays," we cannot help thinking that we know better.