How did I get them?
How did they come into my mind?
Did I invent them?
Did they originate with myself?
Are they my own, or are they some other body's?
You see into what difficulty I had got; I won't trouble you by relating all that I endured at that time, but will merely say that after eating my own heart, as the Italians say, and touching every object that came in my way for six months, I at length flung my book, I mean the copy of it which I possessed, into the fire, and began another.
"But it was all in vain; I laboured at this other, finished it, and gave it to the world; and no sooner had I done so, than the same thought was busy in my brain, poisoning all the pleasure which I should otherwise have derived from my work.

How did I get all the matter which composed it?
Out of my own mind, unquestionably; but how did it come there--was it the indigenous growth of the mind?
And then I would sit down and ponder over the various scenes and adventures in my book, endeavouring to ascertain how I came originally to devise them, and by dint of reflecting I remembered that to a single word in conversation, or some simple accident in a street, or on a road, I was indebted for some of the happiest portions of my work; they were but tiny seeds, it is true, which in the soil of my imagination had subsequently become stately trees, but I reflected that without them no stately trees would have been produced, and that, consequently, only a part in the merit of these compositions which charmed the world--for they did charm the world--was due to myself.
Thus, a dead fly was in my phial, poisoning all the pleasure which I should otherwise have derived from the result of my brain sweat.

'How hard!' I would exclaim, looking up to the sky, 'how hard! I am like Virgil's sheep, bearing fleeces not for themselves.' But, not to tire you, it fared with my second work as it did with my first; I flung it aside, and in order to forget it I began a third, on which I am now occupied; but the difficulty of writing it is immense, my extreme desire to be original sadly cramping the powers of my mind; my fastidiousness being so great that I invariably reject whatever ideas I do not think to be legitimately my own.

But there is one circumstance to which I cannot help alluding here, as it serves to show what miseries this love of originality must needs bring upon an author.

I am constantly discovering that, however original I may wish to be, I am continually producing the same things which other people say or write.