A long experience in every country of the world demonstrates the superiority of woman over man in the epistolary style and especially in love-letter writing, which is the effect not only of the peculiar nature of the feminine mind but also of the powerful excitement created in woman by the stimulus of love. A letter is nearly always an exchange of affections, and woman more than man feels the intimate relations between two affections; she loves more and better than we. Man has a hundred different ways of exerting his talents when excited by love; art, ambition, science open to him a thousand avenues to manifest his new energies; to woman, on the contrary, no literary path is open other than amorous correspondence, and she uses and abuses it in a surprising manner. In the numberless hecatombs, in the daily pyres of many perfumed letters, real treasures of art are being destroyed, which should be saved from the conflagration that consumes so many volumes of words and phrases; for the commonplace always dominates every field of good and evil, and commonplace, like all things human, are most loves. Was it not Balzac who said: "It is recognized that in love all women have some 'esprit'"? The eloquence of love, a real song of a gifted mind in love, is not contradicted by the timid and often dull silence which invariably accompanies the first declarations, the first skirmishes. Fear in all its forms desiccates the mouth and the pharynx, suspends nearly instantaneously the secretions of mucus and saliva, and many are made physically unable to speak, in the same manner as when a violent mental perturbation disconcerts ideas and words, so that eloquence is reduced to an absolute silence, possibly interrupted only by disconnected phrases. That man so mute in love, however, has hardly returned to the quiet of his solitary room when he suddenly becomes a new Demosthenes, and pours out into space or on paper the rivers of a fiery eloquence, which a few moments before would have proved so opportune and so beautiful. Happy love, in the stage of attainment, raises all brains above medium temperature, continually infusing new energies into them. Even during the intoxication, the thyrsus of the dithyramb never falls from the hand of the happy mortal who loves or hopes to be loved. When, on the contrary, our affection vibrates with the notes of sorrow, a sublime elegy may be produced as the outburst of thought; one can become poet or insane. Brains better organized are cured of the great sorrows of the heart with a book, or a musical creation, or a picture; but many human brains submerge in the hurricane of an unhappy love, and the statistics of the hospitals for the insane always show a large number of cases of insanity produced by love, while in the secrecy of the domestic walls are concealed many other brains withered or fallen into lethargy through unfortunate loves.