er why the most of us should be such
bunglers in our conversation, that we should make such a botch of the
medium of communication between human beings, when it is capable of
being made the art of arts.

I have met a dozen persons in my lifetime who have given me such a
glimpse of its superb possibilities that it has made all other arts
seem comparatively unimportant to me.

I was once a visitor at Wendell Phillips's home in Boston, and the
music of his voice, the liquid charm of his words, the purity, the
transparency of his diction, the profundity of his knowledge, the
fascination of his personality, and his marvelous art of putting
things, I shall never forget. He sat down on the sofa beside me and
talked as he would to an old schoolmate, and it seemed to me that I had
never heard such exquisite and polished English. I have met several
English people who possessed that marvelous power of "soul in
conversation which charms all who come under its spell."

Mrs. Mary A. Livermore, Julia Ward Howe, and Elizabeth S. P. Ward, had
this wonderful conversational charm, as has ex-President Eliot of
Harvard.

The quality of the conversation is everything. We all know people who
use the choicest language and express their thoughts in fluent, liquid
diction, who impress us by the wonderful flow of their conversation;
but that is all there is to it. They do not impress us with their
thoughts; they do not stimulate us to action. We do not feel any more
determined to do something in the world, to be somebody, after we have
heard them talk than we felt before.

We know other people who talk very little, but whose words are so full
of meat and stimulating brain force that we feel ourselves multiplied
many times by the power they have injected into us.

In olden times the art of conversation reached a much higher standard
than that of to-day. The deterioration is due to the complete
revolution in the conditions of modern civilization. Formerly people
had almost no other way of communicating their thoughts than by speech.
Knowledge of all kinds was disseminated almost wholly through the
spoken word. There were no great daily newspapers, no magazines or
periodicals of any kind.

The great discoveries of vast wealth in the precious minerals, the new
world opened up by inventions and discoveries, and the great impetus to
ambition have changed all this. In this lightning-express age, in
these strenuous times, when everybody