From this zero of the amatory scale we gradually rise to the maximum degree of the pyrometer, where every metal is melted and volatilized and the entire human organism is transformed into a red and incandescent vapor that burns everything it touches. There are tremendous lovers, who have loved before they were men, who will love, too, when they are men no longer; there are women who have loved, perhaps, since they were closed in the maternal womb, and will love even the sexton who will nail down the cover on the cold coffin which contains their morbid flesh; there are men and women in whom every affection takes a sensual form and love absorbs them like a sponge born, grown and dead in the saline depths of a tropical sea. Having neither time nor patience to wait, they love the first comer, to whom they lend their affections and their imagination; then, discouraged but not wearied, they love the next comer and, always loving more than they are loved, they remain with their thirst forever unquenched. Happy they are when they succeed, although rarely, in being satisfied with consecutive loves; but oftener they precipitate quickly into polygamy, where, through sophisms, reticences and compromises with conscience, they love this one with the heart, that other one with the mind, and all of them with the senses. They have a _first_ love, an _only_ love, a _true_ love; but too frequently they forget the names of such loves and use them to designate too many different lovers, and, like the octopus, they stretch forth their numerous, avid, sucking arms to reach the hot, succulent flesh of the feminine cosmos. Among these polygamists there are some who love only with the heart, others only with the senses; while to a few giants nature concedes the sad gift of a twofold thirst for affection and voluptuousness. Between these two poles, which mark the extreme degrees of amatory intensity, plods the innumerable mass of those men who are neither Don Juans nor chaste Josephs; the numberless women who are neither Messalinas nor Joans of Arc. Besides the variform force of amorous needs, the sentiment which we are now studying together assumes a different character, according to the passion which predominates in the individual and by which love is marked as proud, humble, egotistical, vain, furious, jealous. And around these binary compounds of love and pride, of love and egotism, of love and vanity, there are grouped many other minor elements, which, although with less energetic affinity, still form a homogeneous whole that might be called a "temperament of love" or a "constitutional form of love." I shall try to sketch some of them from nature.