Part 3 (2/2)
We could not conclude our notice of this remarkable family without some further allusion to its not least remarkable member--Caroline Lucretia Herschel.
To her varied accomplishments, her astronomical researches, and, above all, to her unwearied and unselfish devotion to her brother William, we have already made frequent allusion. She seemed to live for him and in him, to live for his fame and prosperity; and she poured out at his feet the treasures of an inexhaustible affection. To a.s.sist him in his labours, at whatever sacrifice, was her sole object in life; and she was certainly more careful for his reputation than was he himself. During his declining years she was his princ.i.p.al stay and support, and she was in daily attendance to note down or to calculate the results of his observations. His death was a severe blow to her; but, with characteristic courage, she retired to Hanover, gave herself up to scientific pursuits, and in comparative solitude spent her later years.
Her biographer writes:--
”When all was over, her only desire seems to have been to hurry away. Hardly was her brother laid in his grave than she collected the few things she cared to keep, and left for ever the country where she had spent fifty years of her life, living and toiling for him and him only. 'If I should leave off making memorandums of such events as affect or are interesting to me, I should feel like what I am,--namely, a person that has nothing more to do in this world.' Mournful words! doubly mournful, when we know that the writer had nearly half an ordinary lifetime still between her and that grave which she made haste to prepare, in the hope that her course was nearly run. Who can think of her, at the age of seventy-two, heart-broken and desolate, going back to the home of her youth in the fond expectation of finding consolation, without a pang of sympathetic pity? She found everything changed.”
_That_, indeed, is to all of us the greatest grief, when we return to the home of our youth. It is as if, during the years of our absence, we had expected everything to stand as still as in the palace of the Sleeping Beauty while the charm rested upon it. We are fain to see the trees in their young greenness as when they sheltered our childhood, to find the hedgerows blooming with the same violets, to hear the mill-stream murmuring with the same music. Time furrows our brows with wrinkles, and streaks our hair with silver; our hearts grow colder; our minds lose their elasticity and freshness; our friends pa.s.s away from our side. But still we think to ourselves that in the old scenes all things are as they were. We say to ourselves: The bird sings as of old in the elm-trees at the garden-foot; the rose-bush blossoms as of old against our favourite window.
”The varying year with blade and sheaf Clothes and re-clothes the happy plains; Here rests the sap within the leaf, Here stays the blood along the veins.
Faint shadows, vapours lightly curled, Faint murmurs from the meadows come, Like hints and echoes of the world To spirits folded in the womb.”
But we regain the old familiar places, and, alas! we find that change has been as busy with them as with us. The signs of decay are upon the trees; the brook has ceased to flow; the rose-bush has withered to the ground. There are trees as green and streams as musical and flowers as sweet as in our youth; but they are not the streams or flowers or trees which delighted us, and to us they can never be as dear. But a worse alteration has taken place than any visible in the face of nature. We discover that we have lost the old habits, the old capacity of enjoyment; and we soon discover that it was the sympathies, the hopes, the aspirations of youth which, after all, lent to these early scenes their rare and irrecoverable attraction.
And thus it was that Miss Herschel found everything changed. A life of fifty years spent in a certain routine and upon certain objects, had unfitted her to tread in the old paths. It soon became clear to her that all her ideas and feelings had been shaped and influenced in a totally different path. More bitter still, we are told, she came to know that in her great sorrow and inextinguishable love she was all alone. And bitterest of all was the feeling that, in losing her brother she had lost the glory of her life, the source of her intellectual enjoyment.
”You don't know,” she wrote to a friend, ”the blank of life after having lived within the radiance of genius.” Yet to live in this blankness, and to do the best she could with it, became the work of Caroline Lucretia Herschel at the age of threescore years and ten,--an age when most of us have already put off our cares and anxieties, but when she began to enter on a new life, with new habits, new duties, and new a.s.sociations.
Her interest in astronomical pursuits never slackened, and she watched with eagerness the labours and successes of her nephew. The respect paid to her in society as a ”woman of science” was not unwelcome, though she affected to make light of it. ”You must give me leave,” she wrote to Sir John, ”to send you any publications you can think of, without mentioning anything about paying for them. For it is necessary I should every now and then lay out a little of my spare cash in that, for the sake of supporting the reputation of being a learned lady; (there is for you!) for I am not only looked at for such a one, but even stared at here in Hanover!” It was with unaffected modesty she deprecated the honorary members.h.i.+p of the Irish Academy, conferred on one who, she said, had not for many years discovered even a comet; yet she was by no means insensible to the distinction. Every man of scientific eminence who visited Hanover visited this aged lady; and her presence in the theatre, even in her latest years, was a constant source of attraction. Such was the simple frugality of her habits, that she experienced an actual difficulty in disposing of her income. She affirmed that the largest sum she could spend upon herself was 50 a year; and the annual pension of 100, left by her brother, she refused, or else devoted the quarterly or half-yearly payment to the purchase of some handsome present for her nephew or niece.
Such was Caroline Lucretia Herschel; and as such she was a remarkable proof that the rarest womanly gifts of affectionate forethought and loving devotion may exist in combination with intellectual strength and scientific enthusiasm.
Of the force, keenness, and permanency of her sisterly love, an ill.u.s.tration of a pathetic character occurs in a letter which she addressed to her nephew, February 27, 1823:--
”I am grown much thinner than I was six months ago: when I look at my hands, they put me so in mind of what your dear father's were, when I saw them tremble under my eyes, as we latterly played at backgammon together.”
It has long been the reproach of England that she treats, or rather that her Government treats, her men of science, her artists, and her litterateurs with a disgraceful parsimony. It would appear from the following letter that Sir William Herschel was inadequately rewarded, and that his sister felt this keenly:--
”There can be no harm,” she says, ”in telling my own dear nephew that I never felt satisfied with the support your father received towards his undertakings, and far less with the ungracious manner in which it was granted. For the last sum came with a message that more must never be asked for. (Oh! how degraded I felt, even for myself, whenever I thought of it!) And after all it came too late, and was not sufficient; for if expenses had been out of question, there would not have been so much time, and labour, and expense, for twenty-four men were at times by turns, day and night, at work, wasted on the first mirror, which had come out too light in the casting (Alex more than once would have destroyed it secretly, if I had not persuaded him against it); and without two mirrors, you know, such an instrument cannot be always ready for observing.
”But what grieved me most was that to the last your poor father was struggling above his strength against difficulties which he well knew might have been removed if it had not been attended with too much expense. The last time the mirror was obliged to be taken from the polisher on account of some obstacle, I heard him say (in his usual manner of thinking aloud on such occasions), 'It is impossible to make the machine act as required without a room three times as large as this.'
”I must say a few words of apology for the good King (George III.), and ascribe the close bargains which were made between him and my brother to the _shabby, mean-spirited advisers_ who were undoubtedly consulted on such occasions; but they are dead and gone, and no more of them.”
In February 1828, the great services which this high-souled woman had rendered to astronomical science were fitly rewarded by the presentation to her of the Royal Astronomical Society's gold medal,--the greatest honour which an astronomer can receive.
Mr. South, himself an astronomer of deserved repute, was charged with the duty of presenting the medal; and in the course of his address he dwelt on the labours of her brother, and the share she had had in them.
Sir William's first catalogue of new nebulae and cl.u.s.ters of stars, he said, amounting in number to one thousand, was compiled with observations made from a twenty-foot reflector in the years 1783, 1784, and 1785. By the same instrument he was enabled to discover the positions of a second thousand of these distant worlds in 1785 to 1788; while the places of five hundred others were registered on the celestial map between 1788 and 1802. What, we may ask, were the discoveries of Columbus compared with these? He revealed to Europe the existence of only a single continent; Herschel unfolded to man the mysteries of the depths of the heavens.
But, continued Mr. South, when we have thus enumerated the results obtained in the course of ”sweeps” with this instrument, and taken into consideration the extent and variety of the other observations which were at the same time in progress, a most important part yet remains untold. Who partic.i.p.ated in his toils? Who braved with him all the experiences of inclement weather? Who shared, and consoled him in, his privations? A woman. And who was she? His sister. Miss Herschel it was who by night acted as his amanuensis; she it was whose pen conveyed to paper his observations as they issued from his lips; she it was who noted the various aspects and phenomena of the objects observed; she it was who, after spending the still night beside the wonder-exhibiting instrument, carried the rough, blurred ma.n.u.scripts to her cottage at daybreak, and by the morning produced a clean copy and register of the night's achievements; she it was who planned the labour of each succeeding night; she it was who reduced into exact form every calculation; she it was who arranged the whole in systematic order; and she it was who largely a.s.sisted her ill.u.s.trious brother to obtain his imperishable renown.
Miss Herschel's claims to the grat.i.tude of men of science, and to the admiration of all who can appreciate the beauty of self-sacrifice, did not end here. She was herself an astronomer, and an original observer.
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