There are no colours in the fairest sky
So fair as these. The feather, whence the pen
Was shaped that traced the lives of these good men,
Dropped from an Angel's wing.[259] With moistened eye
We read of faith and purest charity 5
In Statesman, Priest, and humble Citizen:
O could we copy their mild virtues, then
What joy to live, what blessedness to die!
Methinks their very names shine still and bright;
Apart—like glow-worms on a summer night; 10
Or lonely tapers when from far they fling
A guiding ray;[260] or seen—like stars on high,
Satellites burning in a lucid ring
Around meek Walton's heavenly memory.
FOOTNOTES:
[258] Izaak Walton, author of The Complete Angler, wrote also The Lives of John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Richard Hooker, George Herbert, and Robert Sanderson.—Ed.
[259] With those lines of Wordsworth compare the following: a Sonnet addressed "to the King of Scots," in Henry Constable's Diana, published in 1594—
The pen wherewith thou dost so heavenly singe,
Made of a quill pluck't from an Angell's winge.
A sonnet by Dorothy Berry, prefixed to Diana Primrose's Chain of Pearl, a memorial of the peerless graces, etc., of Queen Elizabeth, London, 1639—
Whose noble praise
Deserves a quill pluck't from an angel's wing.
Also John Evelyn, in his Life of Mrs. Godolphin, "It would become the pen of an angel's wing to describe the life of a saint," etc.—Ed.
[260] 1827.
... glow-worms in the woods of spring,
Or lonely tapers shooting far a light
That guides and cheers,— ... 1822.