_Tender Love._--This love is more frequently felt by men of mild and gentle character; it has shaded outlines and little relief. Emotion surprises them for the slightest cause; tears are always ready to gush forth at the first impulse of joy or sorrow; a perennial compassion and an inexhaustible tenderness drown declarations of love, ardors of voluptuousness and outbursts of affection in a most sweet sea of milk and honey. Tender love is suppliant, lachrymose and faithful; it often touches the boundaries of sensual love, but never enters that sea under full sail. It is a love that is frequently constant and trustworthy, almost as immutable as an old and serene friendship; it has, however, a tendency to being disconsolate and mournful, if not querulous, and it sighs, sobs or weeps too often. Nevertheless, it is capable of wonderful expansiveness which, however interminable, is pregnant with intense joy and sweet solace and predisposes us to universal benevolence, to philanthropy, to forgiveness. It is a Christian, evangelical love that delights more in a caress than in a kiss, and in lingering kisses more than in sudden battles. Its most esthetic forms are found in the woman, whom we readily exculpate from a certain weakness and who may even swoon without making herself ridiculous. Persons with fair complexion, Germans and lymphatic creatures love in this way. _Contemplative Love._--A high, esthetic sense, an irresistible tendency to inertness and limited genital needs constitute the soil in which germinate and grow the various forms of contemplative love. It is a lofty love--too lofty; it has something of the mystic and the supernatural; the lover places his idol very high and prostrates himself before it, lavishing upon it every kind of adoration and incense. Contemplative love is situated in the anterior lobes of the brain; it affects but slightly the somber depths of the heart and hardly skims over the warm wave of voluptuousness; it lives on ecstasies and contemplations and, making of the creature it loves a god or a goddess, it forgets too frequently that the god comprehends a human male, the goddess a human female. This sublime forgetfulness makes of this love the greatest cuckold ever known, because nature can neither be forgotten nor offended with impunity; and while one adores and is absorbed in admiration in the temple, the warlike and rapacious love profanes the tabernacle and carries off the god. Contemplative love lives on the frontiers of pathology, and properly belongs to Arcadic, fanatic and mystic persons. Disillusioned and betrayed, they accuse love of simony and falsehood, when they themselves are only too guilty of having caused their own sorrows and their own bitter disappointments.