Webster had so much confidence in Raymond’s power of reporting him accurately, that, when he intended to make an important speech in the Senate, he would send a note to him, asking him to come to Washington as a personal favor; for he knew that the accomplished editor had a rare power of apprehending a long train of reasoning, and of so reporting it that the separate thoughts would not only be exactly stated, but the relations of the thoughts to each other—­a much more difficult task—­would be preserved throughout, and that the argument would be presented in the symmetrical form in which it existed in the speaker’s mind.  Then would follow, as of old, the severe scrutiny of the phraseology of the speech; and Webster would give, as of old, a new lesson in rhetoric to the accomplished reporter who was so capable of following the processes of his mind.

The great difficulty with speakers who may be sufficiently clear in statement and cogent in argument is that turn in their discourse when their language labors to become figurative.  Imagery makes palpable to the bodily eye the abstract thought seen only by the eye of the mind; and all orators aim at giving vividness to their thinking by thus making their thoughts visible.  The investigation of the process of 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.”