strings: Then there is in Lincoln a quaintness, a homeliness and humor of illustration, along with a most engaging frankness and intellectual honesty. The reader has both an intellectual and moral satisfaction in the clearness and fairness of the statement. All this affects agreeably the literary form, and helps to give Lincoln's style at times the charm of imaginative utterance ; for imagination in literature is, essentially, the faculty of seeing clearly and the art of stating clearly the actual reality. There was nothing of invention in Lincoln's imagination ; his was the imagination that is implied in a strong realization of the truth of things in the mind of the writer or speaker.