"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."
But my present object is simply to give what may be called the natural
history of metaphor, comparison, image, trope, and the like, whether
imagery be employed by an uneducated husbandman, or by a great orator
and writer.
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