CHAPTER IX.

LIFE AT COLLINGWOOD.

Herschel’s career as an observing astronomer came to a virtual end with his departure from the Cape. He was then forty-six, two years younger than his father when he began his course of prodigious activity at Slough. Sir William’s craving to see and to know was insatiable; Sir John’s was appeased by the accomplishment of one grand enterprise. His was a many-sided mind; dormant interests of sundry kinds revived on the first opportunity; new ones sprang up; and curiosity to interrogate the skies ceased to “prick the sides of his intent.” So the instruments taken down at Feldhausen in 1838 were not remounted in England; and their owner is never again recorded to have used a telescope. One cannot but regret that, in the plenitude of his powers, and instructed by rare experience, he should have put by his weapons of discovery.[H] The immense stock of observations with which they had furnished him remained, it is true, in their primitive, rough-hewn state; and he may have considered that wise husbandry required him to save one harvest before planting another. This, at any rate, was the course that he pursued.

[H] The three specula of the twenty-foot are in the possession of Sir William J. Herschel; the tube remains in good preservation at Collingwood.

But it was often and in many ways interrupted. The demands on his time and thoughts were innumerable. Having settled his family for the season in London, he paid his third and last visit to his venerable aunt, and, in returning, dined with Dr. Olbers, the physician-astronomer of Bremen, then in his eightieth year. A fortnight later he was on his way to Newcastle, where the British Association met, August 20th. He was received with acclamation, but overwhelmed by scientific exactions. The proceedings were to him “a dreadful wear and tear,” and they left behind “mixed and crowded recollections.” No wonder. Besides acting as President of the Mathematical Section, he found himself involved in varied responsibilities. He was placed on a Committee for bringing down to date the places of Lacaille’s 10,000 southern stars; on another for revising stellar nomenclature. The reduction of a body of meteorological observations made on a plan of his devising was entrusted to him; above all, he was charged with the development of Humboldt’s international scheme for securing systematic and world-wide observations on terrestrial magnetism. He drew up a memorial to the Government; compiled the Instructions for Sir James Clark Ross’s Antarctic expedition; and elaborately reported progress at several successive meetings of the British Association. His heart was in the work. He contributed an article dwelling on its importance to the _Quarterly Review_ for June, 1840; and in 1845 he expressed the opinion that “terrestrial physics form a subject every way worthy to be associated with astronomy as a matter of universal interest and public support.”

The constellations gave him still more trouble than the vagaries of poised needles. They were in a riot of disorder. Celestial maps had become “a system of derangement and confusion”--of confusion “worse confounded.” New asterisms carved out of old existed precariously, recognised by some, ignored by others; waste places in the sky had been annexed by encroaching astronomers as standing-ground for their glorified telescopes, quadrants, sextants, clocks; a chemical apparatus had been set up by the shore of the river Eridanus, itself a meandering and uncomfortable figure; while serpents and dragons trailed their perplexing convolutions through hour after hour of right ascension. There were constellations so large that Greek, Roman, and Italic alphabets had been used up in designating the included stars; there were others separated by debatable districts, the stars in which often duplicated those situated within the authentic form of one of the neighbouring celestial monsters. Identification was thus in numberless cases difficult; in some, impossible.

In conjunction with Francis Baily, Herschel undertook the almost hopeless task of rectifying this intolerable disorder. After much preliminary labour, he submitted to the Royal Astronomical Society, in 1841, a drastic scheme of constellational reform--a stellar redistribution-bill, framed on radical principles. Its alarming completeness, however, caused it to be let drop; and he finally proposed, in his report of 1844 to the British Association, a less ambitious but more practicable measure. Although not adopted in its entirety, it paved the way for ameliorations. The boundaries of the constellations have since been defined; interlopers have been ejected; one--the Ship Argo--especially obnoxious for its unwieldy dimensions, has been advantageously trisected. Nevertheless, individual star-nomenclature grows continually more perplexed; partial systems have become intermingled and entangled; double stars are designated in one way, variables in another, quick-moving stars in a third, red stars in a fourth, while any one of many catalogue-numbers may be substituted at choice; palpable blunders, unsettled discrepancies, anomalies of all imaginable kinds, survive in an inextricable web of arbitrary appellations, until it has come to pass that a star has often as many aliases as an accomplished swindler.

In the spring of 1840 Herschel removed from Slough to Collingwood, a spacious country residence situated near Hawkhurst, in Kent. Here he devoted himself, in good earnest, to the preparation of his Cape results for the press. It was no light task. The transformation of simple registers of sweeps into a methodical catalogue is a long and irksome process; and Herschel was in possession of the “sweepings” of nearly four hundred nights. He executed it single-handed, being averse to the employment of paid computers. This was unfortunate. Monotonous drudgery was not at all in his line; as well put Pegasus between shafts. He had always found in himself “a great inaptitude” for numerical calculations; and he now acknowledged to Baily that attention to figures during two or three consecutive hours distressed him painfully. Whewell lamented in the _Quarterly Review_ the lavish expenditure of his time and energy upon “mere arithmetic”--computations which a machine would have been more competent to perform than a finely organised human brain. At last, however, in November, 1842, the necessary reductions were finished; and the letterpress to accompany the catalogues of double stars and nebulæ left his hands a couple of years later. The preparation of the plates occasioned further vexatious delays; and it was not until 1847 that the monumental work entitled “Results of Astronomical Observations at the Cape of Good Hope” issued from the press. The expenses of its production were generously defrayed by the Duke of Northumberland. In sending a copy to his aunt, then in her ninety-eighth year, he wrote: “You will have in your hands the completion of my father’s work--‘The Survey of the Nebulous Heavens.’” The publication was honoured with the Copley Medal by the Royal Society, and with a special testimonial by the Astronomical Society.

Bessel, the eminent director of the Königsberg observatory, made Herschel’s personal acquaintance at the Manchester meeting of the British Association in 1842, and paid him a visit at Collingwood. The subject of a possible trans-Uranian planet was discussed between them. The German astronomer regarded its existence as certain, and disclosed the plot he had already formed for waylaying it on its remote path. The premonition stirred Herschel deeply. “There ought to be a hue and cry raised!” he exclaimed in a letter to Baily. And in resigning the Chair of the British Association, September 10, 1846, he spoke with full assurance of the still undiscovered body. “We see it,” he declared, “as Columbus saw America from the shores of Spain. Its movements have been felt, trembling along the far-reaching line of our analysis, with a certainty hardly inferior to that of ocular demonstration.” Within a fortnight, Neptune, through Le Verrier’s indications, was captured at Berlin.

“I hope you agreed with me,” he wrote, November 19, 1846, to Sir William Hamilton, “that it is perfectly possible to do justice to Adams’s investigations without calling in question M. Le Verrier’s _property_ in his discovery. The fact is, I apprehend, that the Frenchmen are only just beginning to be aware _what a narrow escape Mr. Neptune had of being born an Englishman_. Poor Adams aimed at his bird, it appears, first, and as well as Le Verrier, but his gun hung fire, and the bird dropped on the other side of the fence!”

It is well known that Le Verrier and Adams personally ignored controversy as to their respective claims to the planetary _spolia opima_. They were together at Collingwood in July, 1847, with Struve as their fellow-guest. During those few days King Arthur (in the person of Sir John Herschel) “sat in hall at old Caerleon.”

He was elected President of the Royal Astronomical Society for the usual biennial term in 1828, 1840, and 1847; on the last occasion through the diplomatic action of Professor De Morgan. The Society was passing through a crisis; he apprehended its dissolution, and judged that it could only be saved by getting Herschel’s consent to become its nominal head. “The President,” he wrote to Captain Smyth, “must be a man of brass (practical astronomer)--a micrometer-monger, a telescope-twiddler, a star-stringer, a planet-poker, and a nebula-nabber. If we give bail that we won’t let him do anything if he would, we shall be able to have him, I hope. We must all give what is most wanted, and his name is even more wanted than his services. We can do without his services, not without loss, but without difficulty. I see we shall not, without great difficulty, dispense with his name.”

And to Herschel himself: “We have been making our arrangements for the Society for the ensuing year; and one thing is that you are not to be asked to do anything, or wished to do anything, or wanted to do anything. But we want your _name_.” It was lent; and its credit seems to have had the desired effect.

Dr. Whewell vainly tried to inveigle him, in November, 1838, into accepting the presidentship of the Geological Society; but he had to submit, in 1842, to be elected Rector of Marischal College, Aberdeen; and he consented to preside over the meeting of the British Association at Cambridge in June, 1845. His dignity on the occasion was not allowed to interfere with his usefulness. He wrote home June 22: “We have been on the Magnetic Committee working hard all the morning, in a Babel of languages and a Babylonian confusion of ideas, which crystallised into something like distinctness at last.” By that time the long-desired particulars regarding terrestrial magnetism were rapidly accumulating. _Facts_, as Herschel announced from the Presidential Chair, were plentifully at hand. “What we now want is _thought_, steadily directed to single objects, with a determination to avoid the besetting evil of our age--the temptation to squander and dilute it upon a thousand different lines of inquiry.”

Herschel observed the great comet of 1843 from the roof of his house at Collingwood, on March 17, the first evening of its visibility in England. All that could be seen was “a perfectly straight narrow band of considerably bright, white cloud, thirty degrees in length, and about one and a half in breadth.” It was not until the following night that he recognised in this strange “luminous appearance” “the tail of a magnificent comet, whose head at the times of both observations was below the horizon.”

In December, 1850, he was appointed Master of the Mint--a position rendered especially appropriate to him by Newton’s prior occupation of it. The duties connected with it were just then peculiarly onerous. Previously of a temporary and political character, the office now became permanent, and simply administrative. Many other changes accompanied this fundamental one. “The whole concern,” he said, “is in process of reorganisation.” This fresh start demanded much “personal and anxious attendance.” Notwithstanding his anxious regard for the interests of subordinates, the reconstruction could not but be attended by serious friction. No amount of oiling will get rusty wheels to revolve smoothly all at once. “Things progress rather _grumpily_,” he reported privately, “owing to the extreme discontent of some parties.” Further contentious business devolved upon him as a member of the jury on scientific instruments at the Great Exhibition. His time was fully and not agreeably occupied. Rising at six, he worked at home until half-past nine, then hurried to the Mint, which he exchanged between three and four o’clock for the Exhibition, and there, until the closing of its doors, examined the claims, and appeased the quarrels of rival candidates for distinction. He also sat on the Royal Commission appointed in 1850 to inquire into the University system. Its recommendations, agreed to by him in 1855, greatly disgusted Whewell; but their friendship remained unaltered by this discordance of opinion.

These accumulated responsibilities were too much for Herschel’s sensitive nature; and the burthen was made heavier by a partial separation from his family. He was never alone in Harley Street, but the joyous life of Collingwood could not be transported thither; and the arid aspect of a vast metropolis, suggesting business and pleasure in excess, but little of enjoyment in either, oppressed him continually. His health suffered, and in 1855 he withdrew definitively into private life. His resignation of the Mint was most reluctantly accepted.

“I find,” playfully remarked De Morgan, “that Newton and Herschel added each one coin to the list: Newton, the gold quarter-guinea, which was in circulation until towards the end of the century; Herschel, the gold quarter-sovereign, which was never circulated.”

It was not the repose of inaction that Herschel sought at Collingwood. “Every day of his long and happy life,” Professor Tait said truly, “added its share to his scientific services.” Thenceforward he devoted himself chiefly to the formidable task of collecting and revising his father’s results and his own. His “General Catalogue of Nebulæ,” published in the _Philosophical Transactions_ for 1864, was in itself a vast undertaking. It comprised 5,079 nebulæ and clusters, to which it served as a universal index of reference. It averted the mischief of duplicate discoveries, settled the sidereal status of many a pseudo-comet, and quickly became the authoritative guide of both comet- and nebula-hunters. In the enlarged form given to it by Dr. Dreyer in 1888, it is likely long to hold its place. Herschel next, in 1867, amalgamated into a regular catalogue of 812 entries his father’s various classed lists of double stars (Memoirs, Royal Astronomical Society, xxxv.). A far more comprehensive work was then taken in hand. He desired to do for double stars what he had done for nebulæ--to compile an exhaustive register of them in the shape of a catalogue, accompanied by a short descriptive account of each pair. But he was not destined to put this coping-stone to the noble monument erected by his genius. Strength failed him to digest and dispose the immense mass of materials he had collected. Nor was it possible for another to gather up the loose threads of his unfinished scheme. All that could be done was to preserve the imposing fragment as he left it. An ordered list of the 10,320 multiple stars he had proposed to treat was accordingly published in the fortieth volume of the same Society’s _Memoirs_ under the care of Professor Pritchard and Mr. Main. But it hardly possesses more than a commemorative value.

Maria Edgeworth was an old friend of Sir John Herschel’s. In March, 1831, she paid him a three days’ visit at Slough, which, she told a friend in Ireland, “has far surpassed my expectations, raised as they were, and warm from the fresh enthusiasm kindled by his last work” (the “Preliminary Discourse”). Mrs. Herschel she described as “very pretty,” sensible, and sympathetic, and possessed of the art of making guests happy without effort. On Sunday, after service, the philosopher showed off the dazzling colour-effects of polarised light, and at night, with the twenty-foot, “Saturn and his rings, and the moon and her volcanoes.”

After twelve years, she came again, this time to Collingwood. “I should have written before,” Herschel assured Sir William Hamilton, December 1st, 1843, “but Miss Edgeworth has been here, and that, among all people who know how to enjoy her, is always considered an excellent reason for letting correspondence and all other worldly things ‘gang their ain gate.’ She is more truly admirable now, I think, than at any former time, though in her seventy-fifth year.”

Maria herself wrote from Collingwood in the following spring: “Here are Lord and Lady Adare, Sir Edward Ryan, and ‘Jones on Rent.’ Jones and Herschel are very fond of one another, always differing, but always agreeing to differ, like Malthus and Ricardo.”

Sir William Hamilton spent a week under the same hospitable roof in 1846. He was delighted, and, as was his wont, compressed the expression of his pleasure “within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground.” In the first of a pair entitled “Recollections of Collingwood,” he celebrated the “thoughtful walk” with his host, and the “social hours” in a family circle,

“Where all things graceful in succession come; Bright blossoms growing on a lofty stalk, Music and fairy-lore in Herschel’s home.”[I]

[I] The lines are quoted in Graves’s “Life of Hamilton,” vol. ii. p. 525.

The second dealt with “high Mathesis,” and

“dimly traced Pythagorean lore; A westward-floating, mystic dream of FOUR.”

Although not, like his friend, an incorrigible and impenitent sonnetteer, Herschel was “very guilty” of at least one specimen of the art. They were staying together, in June, 1845, at Ely, in the house of Dean Peacock. Hamilton’s inevitable sonnet came duly forth, and “next morning,” he related to De Morgan, “as my bedroom adjoined Herschel’s, and thin partitions did my madness from his great wit divide, I easily heard what Burns might have called a ‘crooning,’ and was not much surprised (being familiar with the symptoms of the attack)[J] when, before we sat down to breakfast at the Deanery, Lady Herschel handed me, in her husband’s name and her own, a sonnet of _his_ to _me_, which, unless the spirit of egotism shall seize me with unexpected strength, I have no notion of letting you see.”

[J] “Aut insanit, aut versos facit.”

The circulation of Herschel’s fervid eulogy would assuredly have put his modesty to the blush. Headed “On a Scene in Ely Cathedral,” it runs as follows:--

“The organ’s swell was hushed, but soft and low An echo, more than music, rang; when he, The doubly-gifted, poured forth whisperingly, High-wrought and rich, his heart’s exuberant flow Beneath that vast and vaulted canopy. Plunging anon into the fathomless sea Of thought, he dived where rarer treasures grow, Gems of an unsunned warmth and deeper glow. O born for either sphere! whose soul can thrill With all that Poesy has soft or bright, Or wield the sceptre of the sage at will (That mighty mace which bursts its way to light), Soar as thou wilt!--or plunge--thy ardent mind Darts on--but cannot leave our love behind.”

Of Hamilton’s abstruse invention, the method of “Quaternions” (here alluded to), Herschel was, from the first, an enthusiastic admirer. He characterised it in 1847 as “a perfect cornucopia, from which, turn it on which side you will, something rich and valuable is sure to drop out.” The “power and pregnancy” of the new calculus were supremely delightful to him, and he advised every mathematician to gain mastery over it as a “working tool.” As such it has not yet been brought into ordinary use, yet it remains in the armoury of science, ready for emergencies.

Miss Mitchell of Nantucket, the discoverer of a comet, and a professor of astronomy, published in 1889 (in the _Century_ magazine) her reminiscences of a short stay at Collingwood in 1858. Her host “was at that time sixty-six, but he looked much older, being lame and much bent in his figure. His mind, nevertheless, was full of vigour. He was engaged in re-writing the ‘Outlines of Astronomy.’” “Sir John’s forehead,” she says, “was bold but retreating; his mouth was very good. He was quick in motion and in speech. He was remarkably a gentleman; more like a woman in the instinctive perception of the wants and wishes of a guest.”

“In the evening,” she relates, “we played with letters, putting out charades and riddles, and telling anecdotes, Sir John joining the family party and chatting away like the young people.” He propounded the question: If one human pair, living in the time of Cheops, had doubled, and their descendants likewise, once every thirty years, could the resulting population find room on the earth? The company thought not. “But if they stood closely, and others stood on their shoulders, man, woman, and child, how many layers would there be?” “Perhaps three,” replied Miss Mitchell. “How many feet of men?” he insisted. “Possibly thirty.” “Enough to reach to the moon,” said his daughter. “To the sun,” exclaimed another. “More, more!” cried Sir John, exulting in the general astonishment. “To Neptune,” was the next bid. “Now you burn,” he allowed. “_Take one hundred times the distance of Neptune, and it is very near._” “That,” he added, “is my way of whitewashing war, pestilence, and famine.”

He further entertained his American guest with accounts of the paradoxical notions communicated to him by self-taught or would-be astronomers. One had inferred the non-existence of the moon from Herschel’s chapters on lunar physics and motions. Another enclosed half-a-crown for a horoscope. A third wrote, “Shall I marry, and have I seen her?” In reference to the efforts then being made to introduce decimal coinage into England, he remarked, “We stick to old ways, but we are not cemented to them.”

The portrait of Caroline Herschel, painted by Tielemann in 1829, which she herself declared to “look like life itself,” hung in the drawing-room. (It is that reproduced in this volume.) “You would say in looking at it,” Miss Mitchell wrote, ‘she must have been handsome when she was young.’ Her ruffled cap shades a mild face, whose blue eyes were even then full of animation. But it was merely the beauty of age.”

Herschel was no exception to the rule that astronomers love music and flowers. He was never tired of gardening, and--to quote James Nasmyth--“his mechanical and manipulative faculty enabled him to take a keen interest in all the technical arts which so materially aid in the progress of science.” The manufacture of specula naturally came home to him, and he watched with genuine pleasure Nasmyth’s grinding and polishing operations. He spent several days with him at Hammerfield in 1864. “Of all the scientific men I have had the happiness of meeting,” Nasmyth wrote in his “Autobiography,” “Sir John stands supremely at the head of the list. He combined profound knowledge with perfect humility. He was simple, earnest, and companionable. He was entirely free from assumptions of superiority, and, still learning, would listen attentively to the humblest student. He was ready to counsel and instruct, as well as to receive information.”

Herschel’s correspondence with De Morgan extended over nearly forty years, and became latterly of an intimate character. “Looking back on our long friendship,” he wrote to the widow shortly after De Morgan’s death in the spring of 1871, “I do not find a single point on which we failed to sympathise; and I recall many occasions on which his sound judgment and excellent feeling have sustained and encouraged me. Many and very distinct indications tell me that I shall not be long after him.”

It fell out as he had predicted. The obituary memoirs of the two are printed close together in the Astronomical Society’s “Monthly Notices.” After a prolonged decline of strength, Sir John Herschel died at Collingwood, in his seventy-ninth year, May 5th, 1871, his intellect remaining unclouded to the last. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, near the grave of Newton. The words engraven above his resting-place, “Coelis exploratis, hic prope Newtonum requiescit,” tell what he did, and what he deserved.

His death created an universal sense of sorrow and of loss. He left vacant a place which could never be filled. His powers, his qualities, and his opportunities made a combination impossible to be reproduced. His genius showed curious diversities from his father’s. He lacked his profound absorption, his penetrating insight, his unaccountable intuitions. A tendency to discursiveness, happily kept in check by strength of will and devotion to an elevated purpose, replaced in him his father’s enraptured concentration. On the other hand, his appreciative instinct for the recondite beauty of mathematical conceptions was wanting to his father. William Herschel possessed fine mathematical abilities; but he cultivated them no further than was necessary for the execution of his designs; and elementary geometry served his turn. But Sir John might have taken primary rank as a pure mathematician. Possibly his inventive faculty would have developed in that line more strongly than in any other. The grasp of his mind was indeed so wide that many possibilities of greatness were open to him. That he chose rightly the one to make effective, no one can doubt. The neglect on his part of astronomy would have been a scientific delinquency. His splendid patrimony of telescopic results and facilities was inalienable. It was a talent entrusted to him, which he had not the right to bury in the ground. He laboured with it instead to the last farthing. Not for his own glory. He aspired only to fill up, for the honour of his father’s name, the large measure of his achievements. In doing so he performed an unparalleled feat. He swept from pole to pole the entire surface of the hollow sphere of the sky. It is unlikely to be repeated. The days of celestial pioneering are past. Nothing on the scale of a general survey will in future be undertaken except with photographic help. The use of the direct telescopic method tends to become more and more restricted. This is a loss as well as a gain. A _hortus siccus_ is to a blooming garden very much what a collection of photographs is to the luminous flowers of the sky. They are depicted more completely, more significantly, more conveniently for purposes of investigation, than they can be seen; but the splendour of them is gone. Their direct contemplation has an elevating effect upon the mind, which indirect study, however diligent and instructive, is incapable of producing. The sublimity of the visions drawn from the abyss of space cannot be reasoned about. It strikes home to the spectator’s inner consciousness without waiting for the approval of his understanding. Thus to Herschel, no less expressly than to the Psalmist three thousand years earlier, “the heavens told the glory of God.” He lived at his telescope a life apart, full of incommunicable experiences.

“To Herschel,” as Mr. Proctor expressed it, “astronomy was not a matter of right ascension and declination; of poising, clamping, and reading-off; of cataloguing and correcting.” “It was his peculiar privilege,” Dean Stanley remarked in his funeral sermon, “to combine with those more special studies such a width of view and such a power of expression as to make him an interpreter, a poet of science, even beyond his immediate sphere.” Hence the popularity of his books, and the favoured place he occupied in public esteem.

His character was of a more delicate fibre than his father’s. It was also, by necessary consequence, less robust. Sir William Herschel surmounted adversity. Sir John would have endured it, had his lot been so appointed. But it never came his way. He was one of those rarest of rare individuals--

“Whose even thread the Fates spin round and full, Out of their choicest and their whitest wool.”

His life was a tissue of felicities. For him there was no weary waiting, no heart-sickening disappointment, no vicissitudes of fortune, no mental or moral tempests. Success attended each one of his efforts; he could look back without regret; he could look forward with confident hope; his family relations brought him unalloyed happiness. He suffered, indeed, one bereavement in the untimely death of his daughter, Mrs. Marshall, the wife of a nephew of Dr. Whewell; but Christian resignation sweetened his sorrow. His religion was unpretending and efficacious. No duty was left by him unfulfilled; and he wore, from youth to age, “the white flower of a blameless life.” A discriminating onlooker said of him, that his existence “was full of the serenity of the sage and the docile innocence of a child.” He was retiring almost to a fault, careless of applause, candid in accepting criticism. Although habitually indulgent, he was no flatterer, “Anyone,” Mr. Proctor said, “who objected to be set right when in error, might well be disposed to regard Sir John Herschel as a merciless correspondent, notwithstanding the calm courtesy of his remarks. He set truth in the first place, and by comparison with her, neither his own opinions, nor those of others, were permitted to have any weight whatever.” Beginners invariably met with his sympathy and encouragement. He felt for difficulties which he himself had never experienced.

Being thus constituted, he could not but inspire affection. The French physicist, Biot, when asked by Dr. Pritchard, after the death of Laplace, who, in his opinion, was his worthiest successor, replied, “If I did not love him so much, I should unhesitatingly say, John Herschel.” His own attachments were warm and constant; and the few scientific controversies in which he engaged, were carried on with his habitual gentleness and urbanity.

Herschel left eight daughters and three sons, of whom the eldest, Sir William James Herschel, succeeded him in the baronetcy, while the second, Professor Alexander Stewart Herschel, has earned celebrity by his meteoric researches. The election of the third, Colonel John Herschel, to a Fellowship of the Royal Society, in recognition of his spectroscopic examination of southern nebulæ, threw a gleam of joy over his father’s deathbed. Lady Herschel survived her husband upwards of thirteen years.

The learned societies of Europe vied with each other in enrolling the name of Sir John Herschel; and he was nominated, in 1855, on the death of Gauss, one of the eight foreign members of the French Academy of Science. As we have seen, he received the Copley Medal from the Royal Society twice, their Royal Medal thrice, and from the Royal Astronomical Society, two Gold Medals and a testimonial. Compliments and homage, however, left him as they found him--quiet, intent, and unobtrusive.

Several portraits of him are in existence. One was executed in oils by Pickersgill for St. John’s College, Cambridge, at a comparatively early period of his life. It is here (page 142) reproduced from an admirable engraving. His later aspect is finely represented in a painting by his eldest daughter, Lady Gordon. The eyes in it are sunken, though brilliant; the shape of the head is concealed by a mane of grey hair. There is about it something of leonine grandeur, disjointed from leonine fierceness. It perpetuates, indeed, the countenance of a man replete with human tenderness.