Part 7 (1/2)

His study of the variable stars attracted wide attention. He found that the star _Mira Ceti_ was for several months invisible to the naked eye; then it grew brighter and brighter, and finally disappeared for months, as before. He saw that other stars are periodic, and came to the conclusion that this is occasioned by the rotation of the star upon its axis, by which different parts of its surface are presented to us periodically.

He made a catalogue of double stars, and found by laborious calculations that such stars have a common centre of gravity; that one sun revolves about another. He found that our solar system has a motion of its own; a grand orbit round some as yet unknown centre, and that other systems have a like motion.

What this centre may be, whether a great sun like Sirius, one hundred times larger than ours, with unknown powers and unknown uses, is of course only conjecture.

Herschel gave much attention to nebulae, discovering and describing twenty-five hundred new nebulae and cl.u.s.ters. He gave his life to the study of the construction of the heavens. Concerning his statement of the general construction, Professor Holden, himself a brilliant astronomer, says: ”It is the groundwork upon which we have still to build.... As a scientific conception it is perhaps the grandest that has ever entered into the human mind. As a study of the height to which the efforts of one man may go, it is almost without a parallel.... As a practical astronomer he remains without an equal. In profound philosophy he has few superiors. By a kindly chance he can be claimed as the citizen of no one country. In very truth his is one of the few names which belong to the whole world.”

The distinguished man, though una.s.suming and gentle in manner, must have had a realizing sense of the greatness of his work, for he said, ”I have looked further into s.p.a.ce than ever human being did before me. I have observed stars of which the light takes _two millions_ of years to travel to this globe.”

He gave much study to light and heat. So boundless was his knowledge believed to be, that a farmer called one day to ask the proper time for cutting his gra.s.s.

”Look at that field,” said the scientist, ”and when I tell you it is mine, I think you will not need another proof to convince you that I am no more weatherwise than yourself or the rest of my neighbors.”

He worked earnestly till he was seventy-six, always depending upon his faithful and inseparable Caroline for aid in his labors. He made a telescope for her, with which she swept the heavens for comets, finding eight, five of which she discovered for the first time.

At seventy-six his health began to fail. He had worked incessantly from his struggling boyhood, but brain work does not wear us out; care and anxiety bring the marks of age upon us. He now took little journeys away from Slough for change of scene and air, while Caroline stayed at home to copy his papers for the Royal Society, and to arrange his ma.n.u.scripts. In 1816, he was made a knight of the Royal Hanoverian Guelphic Order, by the Prince Regent, and in 1821 was the first president of the Royal Astronomical Society, his son being its first foreign secretary.

In February, 1818, Caroline spent twelve precious days with her brother, ”not in idleness,” she says, ”but in sorrow and sadness. He is not only unwell, but low in spirits.” Later he went to Bath with Lady Herschel.

”The last moments before he stepped into the carriage,” says the loving Caroline, ”were spent in walking with me through his library and workrooms, pointing with anxious looks to every shelf and drawer, desiring me to examine all and to make memorandums of them as well as I could. He was hardly able to support himself, and his spirits were so low, that I found difficulty in commanding my voice so far as to give him the a.s.surance he should find on his return that my time had not been misspent.

”When I was left alone I found that I had no easy task to perform, for there were packets of writings to be examined which had not been looked at for the last forty years. But I did not pa.s.s a single day without working in the library as long as I could read a letter without candle-light, and taking with me papers to copy, etc., which employed me for the _best part of the night_, and thus I was enabled to give my brother a clear account of what had been done at his return.”

On the 4th of July, 1819, Herschel sent a note to his dear co-worker.

”Lina,--There is a great comet. I want you to a.s.sist me. Come to dine and spend the day here. If you can come soon after one o'clock we shall have time to prepare maps and telescopes. I saw its situation last night,--it has a long tail.”

Caroline wrote on this small slip of yellow paper: ”I keep this as a relic! Every line _now_ traced by the hand of my dear brother becomes a treasure to me.”

Every day hereafter she spent the forenoon with Sir William. On the 15th of August she went as usual and found that he was confined to his room.

”I flew there immediately,” she says. ”As soon as he saw me, I was sent to the library to fetch one of his last papers and a plate of the forty-foot telescope. But for the universe I could not have looked twice at what I had s.n.a.t.c.hed from the shelf, and when he faintly asked if the breaking up of the Milky Way was in it, I said 'Yes!' and he looked content. I cannot help remembering this circ.u.mstance, it was the last time I was sent to the library on such an occasion. That the anxious care for his papers and workroom never ended but with his life was proved by his frequent whispered inquiries if they were locked and the key safe, of which I took care to a.s.sure him that they were, and the key in Lady Herschel's hands.

”After half an hour's vain attempt to support himself, my brother was obliged to consent to be put to bed, leaving no hope ever to see him rise again. For ten days and nights we remained in the most heart-rending situation till the 25th of August, when not one comfort was left to me but that of retiring to the chamber of death, there to ruminate without interruption on my isolated situation. Of this last solace I was robbed on the 7th of September, when the dear remains were consigned to the grave.”

Faithful and devoted watcher over his dead body, to the last! When he had been buried in the little church at Upton, Windsor, at the age of eighty-four, honored by all Europe and America, Caroline could live no longer where remembrance of him made it intolerable.

She went back to Hanover, ”a person,” she said, sadly, ”that has nothing more to do in this world,” to live with her brother Dietrich. She had come to England, a girl of twenty-two; she went back an elderly woman, seventy-two. The home in Germany did not prove a happy one, but how could it without William? She lived simply, not spending half of the five hundred dollars a year left her by her dead brother.

She had already published ”A Catalogue of eight hundred and sixty Stars, observed by Flamsteed, but not included in the British Catalogue,” and ”A General Index of Reference to every Observation of every star in the above mentioned British Catalogue.” She also prepared ”The Reduction and Arrangement, in the form of a Catalogue in Zones, of all the Star Cl.u.s.ters and Nebulae observed by Sir William Herschel in his Sweeps,” ”a work,” said Sir David Brewster, ”of immense labor; an extraordinary monument of the unextinguished ardor of a lady of seventy-five in the cause of abstract science.”

For this the Royal Astronomical Society voted her the gold medal, and gave her the unusual distinction of honorary members.h.i.+p.

Sixteen years after her return to Hanover, Sir John Herschel, her nephew, who had made his wonderful review of the southern heavens, discovering as many new nebulae as his father, took his only boy, Willie, to see her.

She was now eighty-eight. The visit was overwhelming to her affectionate heart. She watched the child with the most intense delight. Fearing the results if she knew the time of their departure for England, Sir John, with mistaken kindness, went away at four o'clock in the morning, without saying good-by. But the anguish of separation was thereby rendered greater.

The years went by slowly. On her ninety-sixth birthday the King of Prussia sent her a gold medal, Alexander von Humboldt writing her a letter from Berlin to accompany it.

January 14, 1848, at the age of almost ninety-eight, Caroline Herschel died, and was buried from the same garrison church where nearly a century before she had been christened. In her coffin was placed, by her desire, a lock of her brother's hair. Beautiful affection! great co-workers in their immortal study of unnumbered worlds!