Constant as a soaring lark,
Should the country need a heroine,
She might prove our Maid of Arc.
Leave that thought; and here be uttered
Prayer that Grace divine may raise 90
Her humane courageous spirit
Up to heaven, thro’ peaceful ways.[294]
[290] This Westmoreland Girl was Sarah Mackereth of Wyke Cottage, Grasmere. She married a man named Davis, and died in 1872 at Broughton in Furness. The swollen “flood” from which she rescued the lamb, was Wyke Gill beck, which descends from the centre of Silver Howe. The picturesque cottage, with round chimney,—a yew tree and Scotch fir behind it,—is on the western side of the road from Grasmere over to Langdale by Red Bank. The Mackereths have been a well-known Westmoreland family for some hundred years. They belong to the “gentry of the soil,” and have been parish clerks in Grasmere for generations. One of them was the tenant of the Swan Inn referred to in The Waggoner—the host who painted, with his own hand, the “famous swan,” used as a sign. (See vol. iii. p. 81.)
The story of The Blind Highland Boy, which gave rise to the poem bearing that name, was told to Wordsworth by one of these Mackereths of Grasmere. (See the Fenwick note, vol. ii. p. 420.) In a letter to Professor Henry Reed (31st July 1845) Wordsworth said this poem might interest him “as exhibiting what sort of characters our mountains breed. It is truth to the letter.”—Ed.
[291] 1845.