imagination by which this end is reached is an interesting study. Woe to
the speaker who is ambitious to rise into the region of imagination
without possessing the faculty! Everybody remembers the remark of
Sheridan, when Tierney, the prosaic Whig leader of the English House of
Commons, ventured to bring in, as an illustration of his argument, the
fabulous but favorite bird of untrained orators, the phoenix, which is
supposed always to spring up alive out of its own ashes. "It was," said
Sheridan, "a poulterer's description of a phoenix." That is, Tierney,
from defect of imagination, could not lift his poetic bird above the
rank of a common hen or chicken.

The test that may be most easily applied to all efforts of the
imagination is sincerity; for, like other qualities of the mind, it acts
strictly within the limits of a man's character and experience. The
meaning of the word "experience," however, must not be confined to what
he has personally seen and felt, but is also to be extended to every
thing he has seen and felt through vital sympathy with facts, scenes,
events, and characters, which he has learned by conversation with other
men and through books. Webster laid great emphasis on conversation as
one of the most important sources of imagery as well as of positive
knowledge. "In my education," he once remarked to Charles Sumner, "I
have found that conversation with the intelligent men I have had the
good fortune to meet has done more for me than books ever did; for I
learn more from them in a talk of half an hour than I could possibly
learn from their books. Their minds, in conversation, come into intimate
contact with my own mind; and I absorb certain secrets of their power,
whatever may be its quality, which I could not have detected in their
works. Converse, _converse_, CONVERSE with living men, face to face, and
mind to mind,--that is one of the best sources of knowledge."