_"Spires 'whose silent finger points to heaven'"_ (Vol. ix., pp. 9.
85.).--F. R. M., M.A., seems not to have observed that Wordsworth marks
this line as a quotation; and in the note upon it (_Excursion_, 373.) gives
the poetical passage in _The Friend_, whence he took it, thus acknowledging
Coleridge to be the author. The passage is not to be found in the modern
edition of _The Friend_, by the reference in Wordsworth's note to "_The
Friend_, No. 14. p. 223." I presume that _The Friend_ was originally
published in numbers, and that it is to that publication Wordsworth refers.
This is not simply the case, as F. R. M., M.A., suggests, of two authors
using the same idea, but of one also honestly acknowledging his debt to the
other. The idea is of much older date than the prose of Coleridge, or the
verse of Wordsworth. Milton, in his Epitaph on Shakspeare, has:
"Under a star y-pointing pyramid."
Prior has the following line:
"These pointed spires that wound the ambient sky."
Prior's _Poems_: Power, vol. iii. p. 94.,
Edin. 1779.
In Shakspeare we find:
"Yon towers, whose wanton tops do buss the clouds."
_Troilus and Cressida_, Act IV. Sc. 5.
The idea is traceable in Virgil's description of "Fame" or "Rumour" in the
4th Æneid:
"... caput inter nubila condit."