us brings De Quincey before us: "One of the smallest man figures I
ever saw; shaped like a pair of tongs, and hardly above five feet in
all. When he sate, you would have taken him by candlelight for the
beautifullest little child; blue-eyed, sparkling face, had there not
been something, too, which said, 'Eccovi--this child has been in hell!'"

Meditative reflection, when aptly associated with circumstance or
occasion, may become a pleasing source of beauty. When employed by way
of introduction, it may, as frequently in Irving and Hawthorne, strike
the keynote of what follows. Sometimes it gives natural expression to
the vague thought or feeling that had been produced in the reader by the
preceding narrative and that would otherwise have remained unsatisfied.
In the darkness and silence of night the poet hears the striking of a
deep-toned bell. Naturally he thinks of the flight of time.

"The bell strikes one. We take no note of time
But from its loss: to give it then a tongue
Is wise in man. As if an angel spoke,
I feel the solemn sound. If heard aright,
It is the knell of my departed hours."

A meditation may, as a conclusion, impart a satisfying completeness to a
piece. Nothing could be finer, for example, than Addison's reflections
at the close of his essay on the tombs of Westminster Abbey: "When I
look upon the tombs of the great, every emotion of envy dies in me; when
I read the epitaphs of the beautiful, every inordinate desire goes out;
when I meet with the grief of parents upon a tombstone, my heart melts
with compassion; when I see the tomb of the parents themselves, I
consider the vanity of grieving for those whom we must quickly follow.
When I see kings lying by those who deposed them, when I consider rival
wits placed side by side, or the holy men that divided the world with
their contests and disputes, I reflect with sorrow and astonishment on
the little competitions, factions, and debates of mankind. When I read
the several dates of the tombs, of some that died yesterday, and some
six hundred years ago, I consider that great day when we shall all of us
be contemporaries, and make our appearance together."

Harmony of thought and expression is another source of excellence. The
thought should be clothed in a perfect body, so that nothing can be
added or subtracted without marring the beauty. The following stanza
from Holmes's "The Last Leaf" will serve for illustration: