CHAPTER VI.

CAROLINE HERSCHEL.

Caroline Lucretia Herschel was born at Hanover, March 16th, 1750, and was thus more than eleven years younger than the brother with whose name hers is inseparably associated. She remembered the panic caused by the earthquake of 1755, and her experience barely fell short of the political earthquake of 1848; but the fundamental impressions of her long life were connected with “minding the heavens.”

She was of little account in her family, except as a menial. Her father, indeed, a man of high character and cultivated mind, thought much of her future, and wished to improve her prospects by giving her some accomplishments. So he taught her to play the violin well enough to take part in concerted music. But her instruction was practicable only when her mother was out of the way, or in a particularly good humour. Essentially a “Hausfrau,” Anna Ilse had no sympathy with aspirations. She was hard-working and well-meaning, but narrow and inflexible, and she kept her second daughter strictly to household drudgery. Her literary education, accordingly, got no farther than reading and writing; even the third “R” was denied to her. But she was carefully trained in plain sewing and knitting, and supplied her four brothers with stockings from so early an age that the first specimen of her workmanship touched the ground while she stood upright finishing the toe! Few signs of tenderness were accorded to her. Her eldest brother, Jacob, a brilliant musician, and somewhat high-and-mighty in his ways, did not spare cuffs when she waited awkwardly at table; and her sister, Mrs. Griesbach, evidently took slight notice of her. William, however, showed her invariable affection; and him and her father she silently adored. In 1756, when they both returned from England with the Hanoverian Guard, she recalled how, on the day of their arrival,

“My mother being very busy preparing dinner, had suffered me to go all alone to the parade to meet my father, but I could not find him anywhere, nor anybody whom I knew; so at last, when nearly frozen to death, I came home and found them all at table. My dear brother William threw down his knife and fork, and ran to welcome, and crouched down to me, which made me forget all my grievances. The rest were so happy at seeing one another again that my absence had never been perceived.”

How well one can realise the disconsolate little expedition, the woe-begone entry of the six-year-old maiden, her heart-chill on finding herself forgotten, and the revulsion of joy at her soldier-brother’s cordial greeting!

Isaac Herschel died March 22nd, 1767. He had never recovered the campaign of Dettingen, yet struggled, in spite of growing infirmities, to earn a livelihood by giving lessons and copying music. His daughter was thrown by his loss into a “state of stupefaction,” from which she roused herself, after some weeks, to consider the gloomy outlook of her destiny. She was seventeen, and was qualified, as she reflected with anguish, only to be a housemaid. She was plain in face and small in stature, and her father had often warned her that if she ever married it would be comparatively late in life, when her fine character had unfolded its attractions. Still, she did not lose hope of making her way single-handed. Although over-burthened with servile labours, she contrived, unknown to her mother, to get some teaching in fancy-work from a consumptive girl whose cough from across the street gave the signal for a daybreak rendezvous; trusting that, with this acquirement, and “a little notion of music, she might obtain a place as governess in some family where the want of a knowledge of French would be no objection.” There was “no kind of ornamental needlework, knotting, plaiting hair, stringing beads and bugles, of which she did not make samples by way of mastering the art.” She was then permitted to take some lessons in dressmaking and millinery. But the current of her thoughts was completely changed by an invitation from her brother William to join him at Bath. She was, if possible, to be made into a concert-singer. Yet her voice had never been tried, and its very existence was problematical. It may, then, be suspected that William’s primary motive was to come to the rescue of his poor little Cinderella sister.

Months passed in “harassing uncertainty” as to whether she was to go or stay; months, too, during which her own mind was divided between the longing to follow her rising star, and a certain compunctious clinging to her duties at home. Time, however, did not pass in idleness. Taking no notice of the superior Jacob’s ridicule of her visionary transformation into an artist, she quietly set about practising, with a gag between her teeth, the solo parts of violin concertos, “shake and all,” so that, as she says, “I had gained a tolerable execution before I knew how to sing.” She occupied herself besides in making a store of prospective clothing for relatives, who, she could not but fear, would miss her services. For her withdrawal her mother, however, received from William money-compensation, which enabled her to keep a servant in lieu of her daughter. The parting, when he came to fetch her, in August, 1772, was none the less a sorrowful one; but Caroline had much to distract her mind from dwelling on those she had left behind. She had, besides, much discomfort to endure. Six days and nights in an open stage-carriage were followed by a tempestuous passage; the packet in which they embarked at Helvoetsluys reached Yarmouth dismasted and half-wrecked; and they were finally, not duly landed, but “thrown like balls by two sailors,” on the English coast. After a brief glimpse of London, they started, August 28th, in the night coach for Bath, where Caroline arrived “almost annihilated” by fatigue and want of sleep.

Her training for an unfamiliar life began without delay. She had to learn English, arithmetic, and enough of account-keeping to qualify her for conducting the household affairs; a routine of singing-lessons and practising was entered upon; and she was sent out alone to market, Alexander Herschel lurking behind to see that she came safely out of the _mêlée_ of buyers and sellers, whence she brought home “whatever in her fright she could pick up.” She suffered many things, too, from her brother’s servant, “a hot-headed old Welshwoman,” whose _régime_ was one of rack and ruin to domestic utensils; while _heimweh_ made formidable onslaughts on her naturally serene spirits.

A visit to London, as the guest of Mrs. Colebrook, one of her brother’s pupils, gave her some experience of town gaieties. But the expenses of dress and chairmen shocked her frugal ideas; and she thought the young ladies, whose companionship was offered to her, “very little better than idiots.” As a vocalist, Miss Herschel came easily to the front. After a few months of study, her voice was in demand at evening parties; when her foreign accentuation had been corrected, she took the first soprano parts in “The Messiah,” “Samson,” “Judas Maccabæus,” and other oratorios; and sang as prima donna at the winter concerts both at Bath and Bristol. In accordance with her resolution to appear only where her brother conducted, she declined an engagement for a musical festival at Birmingham. A year’s training in deportment was a preliminary to her _début_; a celebrated dancing mistress being engaged--to use Caroline’s own phrase--“in drilling me for a gentlewoman. Heaven knows how she succeeded!” A gift of ten guineas from William provided her with a dress which made her, she was told, “an ornament to the stage;” and she was complimented by the Marchioness of Lothian on “pronouncing her words like an Englishwoman.” Her success was decided, and promised to be enduring enough to satisfy her modest ambition of supporting herself independently.

It was, however, balked by an extraordinary turn of affairs; a turn at first not at all to her liking. After the lapse of half-a-century she still set it down as the grievance of her life that “I have been throughout annoyed and hindered in my endeavours at perfecting myself in any branch of knowledge by which I could hope to gain a creditable livelihood.”

William Herschel, when Caroline joined him at Bath, was just feeling his way towards telescope-making. The fancy did not please her. The beginnings of great things are usually a disturbance and an anxiety. They imply a draft upon the future which may never be honoured, and they often play sad havoc with the present. And Miss Herschel was business-like and matter-of-fact. But her devotion triumphed over her common-sense. Keeping her misgivings to herself, she met unlooked-for demands with the utmost zeal, intelligence, and discretion. She was always at hand when wanted, yet never in the way. Through her care, some degree of domestic comfort was maintained amid the unwonted confusion of optical manufacture. During the tedious process of mirror-polishing, she sustained her brother physically and mentally, putting food into his mouth, and reading aloud “Don Quixote,” and the “Arabian Nights.” She was ready with direct aid, too, and “became in time as useful a member of the workshop as a boy might be to his master in the first year of his apprenticeship.” “Alex,” she continued, “was always very alert, assisting when anything new was going forward; but he wanted perseverance, and never liked to confine himself at home for many hours together. And so it happened that my brother William was obliged to make trial of my abilities in copying for him catalogues, tables, and sometimes whole papers which were lent him for his perusal.” Musical business, meantime, received due attention. Steady preparation was made for concerts and oratorios; choruses were instructed, rehearsals attended, parts diligently written out from scores. But the discovery of Uranus swept away the necessity for these occupations; and with a final performance in St. Margaret’s Chapel, on Whit-Sunday, 1782, the musical career of William and Caroline Herschel came to a close.

Miss Herschel’s “thoughts were anything but cheerful” on the occasion. She saw the terrestrial ground cut from under her feet, and did not yet appreciate the celestial situation held in reserve for her. Music, in her opinion, was her true and only vocation; the contemplation of herself in the guise of an assistant-astronomer moved her to cynical self-scorn. As usual, however, her personal wishes were suppressed. Housewifely cares, too, weighed upon her. The dilapidated gazebo at Datchet provided no suitable shelter for a well-regulated establishment. It was roofed more in appearance than in reality; the plaster fell from the ceilings; the walls dripped with damp; rheumatism and ague were its rightful inmates. Then the prices of provisions appalled her, especially in view of the scarcity of five-pound notes since the opulence of Bath had been exchanged for the penury of a court precinct.

Yet she set to work with a will to learn all that was needful for her untried office. Not out of books. “My dear brother William,” she wrote in 1831, “was my only teacher, and we began generally where we should have ended; he supposing I knew all that went before.” The lessons were of the most desultory kind. They consisted of answers to questions put by her as occasions arose, during breakfast, or at odd moments. The scraps of information thus snatched were carefully recorded in her commonplace book, where they constituted a miscellaneous jumble of elementary formulæ, solutions of problems in trigonometry, rules for the use of tables of logarithms, for converting sidereal into solar time, and the like. Nothing was entrusted to a memory compared by her instructor to “sand, in which everything could be inscribed with ease, but as easily effaced.” So that even the multiplication table was carried about in her pocket. She appears never to have spent a single hour in the systematic study of astronomy. Her method was that in vogue at Dotheboys Hall, to “go and know it,” by practising, as it were, blindfold, what she had been taught. Yet a computational error has never, we believe, been imputed to her; and the volume of her work was very great.

Its progress was diversified by more exciting pursuits. She began, in 1782, to “sweep for comets,” and discovered with a 27-inch reflector, in the autumn of 1783, two nebulæ of first-rate importance--one a companion to the grand object in Andromeda, the other a superb elliptical formation in Cetus. She was by this time more than reconciled to her astronomical lot; Von Magellan, indeed, reported in 1785, that brother and sister were equally captivated with the stars.

The original explorations, in which she was beginning to delight, were interrupted by the commencement of his with the “large twenty-foot.” Her aid was indispensable, and from December, 1783, she “became entirely attached to the writing-desk.” She was no mere mechanical assistant. A wound-up automaton would have ill served William Herschel’s turn. He wanted “a being to execute his commands with the quickness of lightning”; and his commands were various. For he was making, not following precedents, and fresh exigencies continually arose. Under these novel circumstances, his sister displayed incredible zeal, promptitude, and versatility. She would throw down her pen to run to the clock, to fetch and carry instruments, to measure the ground between the lamp-micrometer and the observer’s eye; discharging these, and many other successive tasks with a rapidity that kept pace with his swift proceedings. Fatigue, want of sleep, cold, were disregarded; and although nature often exacted next day penalties of weariness and depression for those nights of intense activity, the faithful amanuensis never complained. “I had the comfort,” she remarked simply, “to see that my brother was satisfied with my endeavours to assist him.” The service was not unaccompanied by danger. One night poor Caroline, running in the dark over ground a foot deep in melting snow, in order to make some alteration in the movement of the telescope, fell over a great hook, which entered her leg so deeply that a couple of ounces of her flesh remained behind when she was lifted off it. The wound was formidable enough, in Dr. Lind’s opinion, to entitle a soldier to six weeks’ hospital-nursing, but it was treated cursorily at Datchet; the patient consoling herself for a few nights’ disablement with the reflection that her brother, owing to cloudy weather, “was no loser through the accident.”

Busy days succeeded watchful nights. From the materials collected at the telescope, she formed properly arranged catalogues, calculating, in all, the places of 2,500 nebulæ. She brought the whole of Flamsteed’s _British Catalogue_--then the _vade mecum_ of astronomers--into zones of one degree wide, for the purpose of William’s methodical examination; copied out his papers for the Royal Society; kept the observing-books straight, and documents in order. Then, in the long summer months, when “there was nothing but grinding and polishing to be seen,” she took her share of that too, and “was indulged with the last finishing of a very beautiful mirror for Sir William Watson.”

On August 1st, 1786, her brother’s absence leaving her free to observe on her own account, she discerned a round, hazy object, suspiciously resembling a comet. Its motion within the next twenty-four hours certified it as such, and she immediately announced the apparition to her learned friends, Dr. Blagden and Mr. Aubert. The latter declared in reply, “You have immortalised your name,” and saw in imagination “your wonderfully clever and wonderfully amiable brother shedding,” upon receipt of the intelligence, “a tear of joy.” This was the first of a series of eight similar discoveries, in five of which her priority was unquestioned. They were comprised within eleven years, and were made, after 1790, with an excellent five-foot reflector mounted on the roof of the house at Slough. Considering that she swept the heavens only as an interlude to her regular duties, never for an hour forsaking her place beside the great telescopes in the garden, her aptitude for that fascinating pursuit must be rated very high. It was not until 1819 that Encke identified her seventh comet--detected November 7th, 1795--with one previously seen by Méchain in January, 1786. None other revolves so quickly, its returns to perihelion occurring at intervals of three and a quarter years. It has earned notoriety, besides, by a still unexplained acceleration of movement.

Caroline Herschel was the first woman to discover a comet; and her remarkable success in what Miss Burney called “her eccentric vocation,” procured for her an European reputation. But the homage which she received did not disturb her sense of subordination. “Giving the sum of more to that which hath too much,” she instinctively transferred her meed of praise to her brother. She held her comets, notwithstanding, very dear. All the documents relating to them were found after her death neatly assorted in a packet labelled “Bills and Receipts of my Comets”; and the telescopes with which they had been observed ranked among the chief treasures of her old age. She presented the smaller one before her death to her friend Mr. Hausmann; the five-foot to the Royal Astronomical Society, where it is religiously preserved.

The “celebrated comet-searcher” was described by Miss Burney in 1787 as “very little, very gentle, very modest, and very ingenuous; and her manners are those of a person unhackneyed and unawed by the world, yet desirous to meet and return its smiles.” To Dr. Burney, ten years later, she appeared “all shyness and virgin modesty”; while Mrs. Papendick mentions her as “by no means prepossessing, but an excellent, kind-hearted creature.” She was, in 1787, officially appointed her brother’s assistant, with a salary of fifty pounds a year; “and in October,” she relates, “I received twelve pounds ten, being the first quarterly payment of my salary, and the first money I ever in all my lifetime thought myself to be at liberty to spend to my own liking.” The arrangement was made in anticipation of her brother’s marriage, when--to quote her one bitter phrase on the subject--“she had to give up the place of his housekeeper.” She did not readily accommodate herself to the change; and a significant gap of ten years in her journal suggests that she wrote much during that time of struggle which her calmer judgment counselled her to destroy. Her strong sense of right and habitual abnegation, however, came to her aid; the family relations remained harmonious; and she eventually became deeply attached to her gentle sister-in-law. But from 1788 onwards, she lived in lodgings, either at Slough or Upton, whence she came regularly to the observatory to do her daily or nightly work.

Miss Herschel began in 1796, and finished in about twenty months, an Index to Flamsteed’s observations of the stars in the “British Catalogue.” A list of “errata” was added, together with a catalogue of 561 omitted stars. The work, one of eminent utility, was published in 1798, at the expense of the Royal Society. In August, 1799, she paid a visit to the Astronomer Royal, with the object of transcribing into his copy of Flamsteed’s Observations some memoranda upon them made by her brother. “But the succession of amusements,” we hear, “left me no alternative between contenting myself with one or two hours’ sleep per night during the six days I was at Greenwich, and going home without having fulfilled my purpose.” Needless to say that she chose the former.

The Royal family paid her many attentions, partly, no doubt, because of her intimacy with one of the ladies-in-waiting to the Queen. This was Madame Beckedorff, who although of “gentle” condition, had attended the same dressmaking class with the bandmaster’s daughter at Hanover, in 1768. The distant acquaintanceship thus formed developed, at Windsor, into a firm friendship, transmitted in its full cordiality to a second generation. An entry in Caroline’s Diary tells of a dinner at Madame Beckedorff’s, February 23, 1801, when the “whole party left the dining-room on the Princesses Augusta and Amelia, and the Duke of Cambridge coming in to see me.” In May, 1813, during a visit to London, she passed several evenings at Buckingham House, “where I just arrived,” she says, on May 12, “as the Queen and the Princesses Elizabeth and Mary, and the Princess Sophia Matilda of Gloucester, were ready to step into their chairs, going to Carlton House, full dressed for a fête, and meeting me in the hall, they stopped for near ten minutes, making each in their turn the kindest inquiries how I liked London, etc. On entering Mrs. Beckedorff’s room, I found Madame D’Arblay (Miss Burney), and we spent a very pleasant evening.”

Such Royal condescensions were frequent, and on occasions inconvenient. The Princesses Sophia and Amelia, in especial, took a strong liking for Miss Herschel’s conversation, and often required her attendance for many hours together. She was graciously singled out for notice at the Frogmore assemblages, and became quite inured to the reception at Slough of dignitaries and _savants_. Nothing deranged the simple composure of her deportment. One would give much to know what were her private impressions about the notabilities who crossed her path; but her memoranda are, in this respect, perfectly colourless. Names and dates are jotted down with the same brevity as her entries of “work done.” Even the personal troubles of years are curtly disposed of. Her brother Dietrich’s stay in England from 1809 to 1813, left her not a day’s respite from accumulated trouble and anxiety. Yet it occasioned only one little outburst, penned long afterwards.

“He came,” she wrote, “ruined in health, spirit, and fortune, and, according to the old Hanoverian custom, I was the only one from whom all domestic comforts were expected. I hope I acquitted myself to everybody’s satisfaction, for I never neglected my eldest brother’s business” (Jacob Herschel died in 1792), “and the time I bestowed on Dietrich was taken entirely from my sleep, or what is generally allowed for meals, which were mostly taken running, or sometimes forgotten entirely. But why think of it now?”

Her later journal is overshadowed with the fear of coming bereavement. Recurrences to the state of William’s health become ominously frequent. “He is not only unwell, but low in spirits,” she notes in February, 1817; and the following account of his departure for Bath, April 2, 1818, betrays her deep trouble:--

“The last moments before he stepped into the carriage were spent in walking 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 assurance he should find on his return that my time had not been misspent.”

“May 1st.--But he returned home much worse than he went, and for several days hardly noticed my handiworks.”

His last note to her, indited with an uncertain hand on a discoloured slip of paper, July 4, 1819, she put by with the inscription: “I keep this as a relic. Every line _now_ traced by the hand of my dear brother becomes a treasure to me.”

“Lina,” it ran, “there is a great comet. I want you to assist 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.”

Through that long tail the earth had, eight days previously--according to Olbers’s calculations--cut its way; but the proposed observations at Slough, if made, were never published.

In October, 1821, Caroline Herschel wrote this melancholy “Finis” to what seemed to herself the only part of her life worth living. “Here closed my day-book; for one day passed like another, except that I, from my daily calls, returned to my solitary and cheerless home with increased anxiety for each following day.”

Eighteen months after her loss of “the dearest and best of brothers,” she at last gathered fortitude to put on paper her recollections of the “heartrending occurrences” witnessed by her during the closing months of her fifty years’ sojourn in England. In every line of what she then wrote, her absorbed fidelity to him, growing more and more tenacious as the end drew visibly nigher, comes out with unconscious pathos. The anguish with which she watched each symptom of decay seared her heart, but was refused any outward expression. She played out her rôle of self-suppression until the curtain fell. A last gleam of hope visited her July 8th, 1822, when she marked down in an almanac the cheering circumstance that her invalid had “walked with a firmer step than usual above three or four times the distance from the dwelling-house to the library, in order to gather and eat raspberries in his garden with me. But,” she added sadly, “I never saw the like again.”

In the impetuosity of her grief, she made an irreparable mistake. Only a month earlier she had surrendered to her impecunious brother Dietrich her little funded property of £500; now, without reflecting on the consequences, she “gave herself, with all she was worth, to him and his family.” She was in her seventy-third year; her only remaining business in life, it seemed to her, was to quit it; the virtual close of her career had come; the actual close could not long be delayed. So she retired to her native place to die promptly, if that might be, but, at any rate, to mark the chasm that separated her from the past. She soon recognised, however, that she had taken a false step. “Why did I leave happy England?” was the cry sometimes on her lips, always in her heart, for a quarter of a century. She was taken aback by her own vitality. She found out too late that her powers of work, far from being exhausted, might have been turned to account for her nephew as they had been for her brother. And it was to him and his mother, after all, that her strong affections clung. Her relatives in Hanover, although they treated her with consideration, were hopelessly uncongenial. “From the moment I set foot on German ground,” she said, “I found I was alone.” Fifty years is a huge gap in a human life. Miss Herschel had been all that time progressing from the starting point where they had remained stationary. Their tastes were then necessarily incongruous with hers; nor could her interests be transplanted at will from the soil in which they were rooted. She was unable to perceive that the change was in herself. The “solitary and useless life” she led resulted, she was convinced, from her “not finding Hanover, or anyone in it, like what I left when the best of brothers took me with him to England in August, 1772!”

An exile in her old home, she felt pledged to remain there. She would not “take back her promise.” For a person of her frugal habits, she was well off. Her pension of fifty pounds would have supplied her small wants, and she was reluctantly compelled to accept the annuity of £100, left to her by her brother. And since she was most generous in the bestowal of her spare cash, her presence was of some material advantage to a poor household. It gave them credit, too; and notwithstanding that they “never could agree” in opinions, she faithfully nursed Dietrich Herschel until his death in January, 1827.

“I am still unsettled,” she wrote to her nephew, December 26th, 1822, “and cannot get my books and papers in any order, for it is always noon before I am well enough to do anything, and then visitors run away with the rest of the day till the dinner-hour, which is two o’clock. Two or three evenings in each week are spoiled by company. And at the heavens there is no getting, for the high roofs of the opposite houses. But within my room I am determined nothing shall be wanting that can please my eye. Exactly facing me is a bookcase placed on a bureau, to which I will have some glass doors made, so that I can see my books. Opposite this, on a sofa, I am seated, with a sofa-table and my new writing-desk before me; but what good I shall do there the future must tell.”

Seated at that “new desk,” she completed her most important work. This was the reduction into a catalogue, and the arrangement into zones, of all Sir William Herschel’s nebulæ and clusters. Despatched to Sir John Herschel in April, 1825, it made his review of those objects feasible. From it, he drew up his “working-list” for each night’s observations; and from it, in constructing his “General Catalogue” of 1864, he took the places of such nebulæ as he had not been able to examine personally. In the course of the needful comparisons, “I learned,” he said, “fully to appreciate the skill, diligence, and accuracy which that indefatigable lady brought to bear on a task which only the most boundless devotion could have induced her to undertake, and enabled her to accomplish.” For its execution, the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society was awarded to her in 1828--an honour by which she was “more shocked than gratified.” Her “Zone-Catalogue” was styled by Sir David Brewster “an extraordinary monument of the unextinguished ardour of a lady of seventy-five in the cause of abstract science.”

In 1835, she was created an honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society, Mrs. Somerville being associated with her in a distinction never before or since conferred upon a woman. Three years later, she was surprised by the news that the Royal Irish Academy had similarly enrolled her. “I cannot help,” she wrote, “crying out aloud to myself, every now and then, What is that for?” The arrival, on another occasion, of presentation-copies of Mrs. Somerville’s “Connexion of the Physical Sciences,” and of Baily’s “Account of Flamsteed,” agitated her painfully. “Coming to _me_ with such things,” she exclaimed, “an old, poor, sick creature in her dotage.” “I think it is almost mocking me,” she added in 1840, “to look upon me as a Member of an Academy; I that have lived these eighteen years without finding as much as a single comet.”

Her local celebrity, nevertheless, diverted her. It struck her as a capital joke that she was “stared at for a learned lady.” Down to 1840 she regularly attended plays and concerts, and rarely left the theatre without a “_Wie geht’s?_” from His Majesty. And to find herself--“a _little_ old woman”--conspicuous in the crowd, produced a sense of exhilaration. Her presence or absence was a matter of public concern, and she very seldom appeared otherwise than alert and cheerful. When close upon eighty her “nimbleness in walking,” she remarked, “has hitherto gained me the admiration of all who know me; but the good folks are not aware of the arts I make use of, which consist in never leaving my room in the daytime except I am able to trip it along as if nothing were the matter.” Music gave her unfailing pleasure. She heard Catalani in 1828; shared in the Paganini _furore_ of 1831, and conversed with him through an interpreter. With Ole Bull she was “somewhat disappointed,” finding his performance “more like conjuration than playing on a violin.”

But her “painful solitude” was most of all cheered by the visits and communications of eminent men. No one of distinction in science came to Hanover without calling upon her. Humboldt, Gauss, Mädler, Encke, Schumacher, paid her their respects, personally or by letter, if not in both ways. “Next to listening to the conversation of learned men,” she told the younger Lady Herschel, “I like to hear about them; but I find myself, unfortunately, among beings who like nothing but smoking, big talk on politics, wars, and such-like things.” Her situation remained, to the end, displeasing to her. She made the best of it; but the best was, to her thinking, bad. Having wilfully flung herself out of the current of life, she was nevertheless surprised at being stranded. She recurred, with inextinguishable pain, to the crippling effects of circumstances and old age.

“I lead a very idle life,” she wrote in 1826. “My sole employment consists in keeping myself in good humour, and not being disagreeable to others.” And in 1839: “I get up as usual, every day, change my clothing, eat, drink, and go to sleep again on the sofa, except I am roused by visitors; then I talk till I can talk no more--nineteen to the dozen!” While at nights “the few, few stars I can get at out of my window only cause me vexation, for to look for the small ones on the globe my eyes will not serve me any longer.”

She followed, however, with intense delight the progress of her nephew’s career, in which she beheld the continuation of his father’s. The intelligence of his having opened a nebular campaign in 1825, was like the sound of the trumpet to a disabled war-horse. Nothing but the decline of her powers, she assured him, would have prevented her “coming by the first steamboat to offer you the same assistance as, by your father’s instructions, I was enabled to afford him.” And again, in 1831: “You have made me completely happy with the account you sent me of the double stars; but it vexes me more and more that in this abominable city there is no one who is capable of partaking in the joy I feel on this revival of your father’s name. His observations on double stars were, from first to last, the most interesting subject; he never lost sight of it. And I cannot help lamenting that he could not take to his grave the satisfaction I feel at seeing his son doing him such ample justice by endeavouring to perfect what he could only begin.”

Sir John’s trip to the Cape roused her ardent sympathy. “Ja!” she exclaimed, on hearing of the project, “If I were thirty or forty years younger, and could go too. In Gottes Namen!” But she was eighty-two, and could only give vent to her feelings by “jingling glasses with Betty” after dinner on his birthday, while mistress and maid together cried, “Es lebe Sir John! Hoch! Hurrah!” The reports of his achievements in the southern hemisphere were, she said, “like a drop of oil supplying my expiring lamp.” “At first, on reading them,” she wrote to Lady Herschel, “I could turn wild; but this is only a flash; for soon I fall into a reverie on what my dear nephew’s father would have felt if such letters could have been directed to him, and cannot suppress my wish that _his_ life instead of _mine_ had been spared until this present moment.”

The joyful intelligence of her nephew’s safe return to England was sent to Miss Herschel by the Duke of Cambridge, whose attentions to her were unfailing; and she lived to hold in her hands the volume of “Cape Results,” by which her brother’s great survey of the heavens was rounded off to completion. But by that time the lassitude of approaching death was upon her.

Three visits from her nephew broke the monotony of separation. In October, 1824, he stopped at Hanover on his way homeward from the Continent. Before his arrival, her “arms were longing to receive him”; after his departure, she “followed him in idea every inch he moved farther” away from her. Six years passed, and then he came again.

“I found my aunt,” he reported, June 19th, 1832, “wonderfully well, and very nicely and comfortably lodged, and we have since been on the full trot. She runs about the town with me, and skips up her two flights of stairs as light and fresh at least as some folks I could name who are not a fourth part of her age. In the morning till eleven or twelve she is dull and weary; but as the day advances she gains life, and is quite ‘fresh and funny’ at ten or eleven p.m., and sings old rhymes, nay, even dances! to the great delight of all who see her.”

Their final meeting was in 1838, when Sir John’s Cape laurels were just gathered; and he brought with him his eldest son, aged six. But the old lady was terrified lest the child should come to harm; his food, his sleep, his scramblings, his playthings, were all subjects of the deepest anxiety. Then Sir John, desiring to spare her “the sadness of farewell,” perpetrated a moonlight flitting, which left her dismayed and desolate at the abrupt termination of the visit, and smarting with the intolerable consciousness of opportunities lost for saying what could now never be said. “All that passed,” she said, “was like Sheridan’s Chapter of Accidents.” It was too much for her; she did not desire the repetition of a pleasure rated at a price higher than she could afford to pay. “I would not wish on any account,” she told Lady Herschel in 1842, “to see either my nephew or you, my dear niece, again in this world, for I could not endure the pain of parting once more; but I trust I shall find and know you in the next.”

She lived habitually in the past, and found the present--as Mrs. Knipping, Dietrich’s daughter said--“not only strange, but annoying.” Sometimes she would rouse herself from a “melancholy lethargy” to spend a few moments “in looking over my store of astronomical and other memorandums of upwards of fifty years’ collecting, and destroying all that might produce nonsense when coming through the hands of a Block-kopf into the Zeitungen.” Again she would dip back into the career of the “forty-foot,” or recall the choral performance to which the tube had resounded not far from sixty years before, “when I was one of the nimblest and foremost to get in and out of it. But now--lack-a-day--I can hardly cross the room without help. But what of that? Dorcas, in the _Beggars’ Opera_, says:

“‘One cannot eat one’s cake and have it too!’”

That venerable instrument marked for her the _ne plus ultra_ of optical achievement. She would not admit the sacrilegious thought of its being outdone. “I believe I have water on my brains,” she informed her nephew in August, 1842, “and all my bones ache so that I can hardly crawl; and, besides, sometimes a whole week passes without anybody coming near me, till they stumble on a paragraph in the newspaper about Gruithuisen’s discoveries, or Lord Queenstown’s great telescope, which _shall_ beat Sir William Herschel’s all to nothing; and such a visit sometimes makes me merry for a whole day.”

From time to time she wrote books of “Recollections,” which she forwarded, with anxious care, to England. They contain nearly all that is intimately known of Sir William Herschel’s life. The entries in her “Day-book” ceased finally only on September 3rd, 1845. In the hope of giving permanent form to the memories that haunted her, she began, at ninety-two, “a piece of work which I despair of finishing before my eyesight and life leave me in the lurch. You will, perhaps, wonder what such a thing can be as I may pretend to do; but I cannot help it, and shall not rest till I have wrote the history of the Herschels.” “You remember,” she added, “you take the work in whatever state I may leave it, and make the best of it at your leisure.” It remained a piquant fragment. The fervour of her start was soon quenched by physical collapse, and she acknowledged her powerlessness “to do anything beside keeping herself alive.” Her last letter to Collingwood was finished with difficulty, December 3rd, 1846. Monthly reports of her state, however, continued to be sent thither by Miss Beckedorff, who, with Mrs. Knipping, cared for her to the last.

In honour of her ninety-sixth birthday, the King of Prussia sent her, through Humboldt’s friendly hands, the Gold Medal of Science; and on the following anniversary, March 16th, 1847, she entertained the Crown Prince and Princess for two hours. Not only with conversation; she sang to them, too, a composition of Sir William’s, “Suppose we sing a Catch.” She had a new gown and smart cap for the occasion; and seemed “more revived than exhausted” by her efforts. Her last message to her nephew and his family--sent March 31st--was to say, with her “best love” “that she often wished to be with them, often felt alone, did not quite like old age with its weaknesses and infirmities, but that she, too, sometimes laughed at the world, liked her meals, and was satisfied with Betty’s services.”

On the 9th of January, 1848, she tranquilly breathed her last, and “the unquiet heart was at rest.” She was buried beside her parents in the churchyard of the Gartengemeinde, at Hanover, with an epitaph of her own composition.[F] It records that the eyes closed in death had in life been turned towards the “starry heavens,” as her discoveries of comets, and her participation in her brother’s “immortal labours,” bear witness to future ages. By her special request a lock of “her revered brother’s” hair, and an old almanac used by her father, were placed in her coffin, which was escorted to the grave by royal carriages, and covered with wreaths of laurel and cypress from the royal gardens at Herrenhausen.

[F] “Der Blick der Verklärten war hienieden dem gestirnten Himmel zugewandt; die eigenen Cometen-Entdeckungen, und die Theilnahme an den unsterblichen Arbeiten ihres Bruders, Wilhelm Herschel, zeugen davon bis in die späteste Nachwelt.”

Caroline Herschel was not a woman of genius. Her mind was sound and vigorous, rather than brilliant. No abstract enthusiasm inspired her; no line of inquiry attracted her; she seems to have remained ignorant even of the subsequent history of her own comets. She prized them as trophies, but not unduly. The assignment of property in comets reminded her, she humorously remarked, when in her ninety-third year, of the children’s game, “He who first cries ‘Kick!’ shall have the apple.” Yet her faculties were of no common order, and they were rendered serviceable by moral strength and absolute devotedness. Her persistence was indomitable, her zeal was tempered by good sense; her endurance, courage, docility, and self-forgetfulness went to the limits of what is possible to human nature. With her readiness of hand and eye, her precision, her rapidity, her prompt obedience to a word or glance, she realised the ideal of what an assistant should be.

Herself and her performances she held in small esteem. Compliments and honours had no inflating effect upon her. Indeed, she deprecated them, lest they should tend to diminish her brother’s glory. “Saying too much of what I have done,” she wrote in 1826, “is saying too little of him, for he did all. I was a mere tool which _he_ had the trouble of sharpening and adapting for the purpose he wanted it, for lack of a better. A little praise is very comforting, and I feel confident of having deserved it for my patience and perseverance, but none for great abilities or knowledge.” Again: “I did nothing for my brother but what a well-trained puppy-dog would have done; that is to say, I did what he commanded me.” And her entire and touching humility appears concentrated in the following sentence from a letter to her nephew: “My only reason for saying so much of myself is to show with what miserable assistance your father made shift to obtain the means of exploring the heavens.”

The aim in life of this admirable woman was not to become learned or famous, but to make herself useful. Her function was, in her own unvarying opinion, a strictly secondary one. She had no ambition. Distinctions came to her unsought and incidentally. She was accordingly content with the slight and fragmentary supply of knowledge sufficing for the accurate performance of her daily tasks. No inner craving tormented her into amplifying it. The following of any such impulse would probably have impaired, rather than improved, her efficiency. The turn of her mind was, above all things, practical. She used formulæ as other women use pins, needles and scissors, for certain definite purposes, but with complete indifference as to the mode of their manufacture. What was required of her, however, she accomplished superlatively well, and this was the summit of her desires. She shines, and will continue to shine, by the reflected light that she loved.