"I pass my time between Greenwich and London, agreeably enough, but am
rather at a loss for work that I like. Company is not always pleasing,
and I would much rather be polishing a speculum.... I am introduced to
the best company. To-morrow I dine at Lord Palmerston's, next day with
Sir Joseph Banks, etc., etc. Among opticians and astronomers nothing now
is talked of but _what they call_ my great discoveries. Alas! this shows
how far they are behind, when such trifles as I have seen and done are
called _great_. Let me but get at it again! I will make such telescopes,
and see such things--that is, I will endeavor to do so."
And this great ambition nerved him for action, continued and laborious,
as long as he lived. He was never satisfied; always achieving. Little
can be expected from those who are easily satisfied.
George III. wisely appointed Herschel Royal Astronomer, though with the
too small salary of one thousand dollars yearly. He came back to Bath
only to perform the last musical duty on Whit Sunday, 1782, the anthem
for the day being his own composition, and to say good-by to his pupils.
He moved to Datchet in 1782, and set up his twenty-foot telescope. In
1783 he had made three reviews of the heavens. In 1784 he made a fourth
review with his twenty-foot telescope. Caroline says: "My brother began
his sweeps when the instrument was yet in a very unfinished state, and
my feelings were not very comfortable when every moment I was alarmed by
a crash or a fall, knowing him to be elevated fifteen feet or more on a
temporary crossbeam, instead of a safe gallery. The ladders had not even
their braces at the bottom; and one night, in a very high wind, he had
hardly touched the ground before the whole apparatus came down.... I
could give a pretty long list of accidents which were near proving fatal
to my brother as well as myself."
A gentleman who visited him at Datchet wrote: "The thermometer in the
garden stood at 13 deg. Fahrenheit; but in spite of this, Herschel observes
the whole night through, except that he stops every three or four hours
and goes in the room for a few moments. For some years Herschel has
observed the heavens every hour when the weather is clear, and this
always in the open air, because he says that the telescope only performs
well when it is at the same temperature as the air. He protects himself
against the weather by putting on more clothing. He has an excellent
constitution, and thinks about nothing else in the world but the
celestial bodies."
But, occupied as Herschel was about "celestial bodies," he yet found
time to think about earthly things, for we find him at forty-five, May
8, 1783, marrying Mary, the wealthy widow of John Pitt, Esq., a lady of
much intelligence and amiability.
The sad feature of the new relationship was the misery it brought to
Caroline. Her whole life had centred in William. For eleven years she
had devoted every moment, every wish, every thought to him. She had
watched all night among the stars with him, month after month, and year
after year, in cold and in heat, and superintended his home by day. His
every desire was her law. She loved no other, and he was her all.
Perhaps she ought to have known that another might come into his life,
but she trusted blindly, and did not question the future.
When the wife came into the home, Caroline went out of it forever. For
more than twenty years she lived in lodgings, always "cheerless and
solitary," her only happiness found in coming day by day to help her
brother in his great work. Sometimes, when the wife was absent, Caroline
came back for a few days and lived over the old unalloyed life, and then
went back to her lonely lodgings.
For ten years following this marriage, she probably told her heart-aches
in her journal; but before her death she destroyed the record of these
years, that the feelings of those who were alive might not be pained. In
later days she became more reconciled to Lady Herschel, as "a dear
sister, for as such I now know you," and idolized their only son, the
renowned Sir John Herschel, born nine years after their marriage.
In 1785, Herschel began to construct his great forty-foot telescope, and
the next year removed to Slough, not far from Windsor. "In the whole of
the apparatus," he said, "none but common workmen were employed, for I
made drawings of every part of it, by which it was easy to execute the
work, as I constantly inspected and directed every person's labor;
though sometimes there were not less than forty different workmen
employed at the same time. While the stand of the telescope was
preparing, I also began the construction of the great mirror, of which I
inspected the casting, grinding, and polishing; and the work was in this
manner carried on with no other interruption than that occasioned by the
removal of all the apparatus and materials from where I then lived, to
my present situation at Slough." He had his first view through the
telescope February 19, 1787. George III. gave twenty thousand dollars
for the building of this instrument, and one thousand dollars yearly for
its maintenance.
A half-century afterwards, the woodwork having become decayed, it was
taken down, the great tube laid horizontally, and, after Sir John
Herschel and his family had passed through it, a poem written by Sir
John having been read, it was sealed January 1, 1840, and placed on
piers.
With this great telescope, Herschel discovered two satellites of Saturn,
Mimas and Enceladus; one on August 27, 1789, and the other on September
17 of the same year. Two years before this, January 11, 1787, he
discovered two satellites of Uranus, Oberon and Titania. Sixty years
afterwards, Mr. Lassell, of England, discovered the remaining two
satellites of Uranus, called Ariel and Umbriel.
From this time his work went forward grandly. He had already completed
more than two hundred seven-foot, one hundred and fifty ten-foot, and
eighty twenty-foot mirrors. For many of the telescopes sent abroad he
made no stands, but provided the drawings. He wrote much about Saturn
and its rings, and showed that its most distant satellite, Japetus,
turns once on its axis in each revolution about its primary, as our moon
does about the earth.
He studied carefully the nature of the sun, its probable gaseous
surface, and its spots, and was the first to suspect their periodic
character. What would Herschel have said to the wonderful photographic
representations of these spots given by Professor Langley, in his New
Astronomy; spots which are one billion square miles in size; more than
five times the surface of the land and water on the earth? He saw, as
astronomers to-day see, that heat cannot be produced without expenditure
of force; and that the sun is probably cooling, even though scarcely
perceptibly for ages to come. He saw what science now generally
concedes, the rise and fall of the solar system; its gradual fitness for
the coming of man, through almost countless centuries; and its final
unfitness, when his generations shall have gone forever.
He wrote much about the Milky Way, believing at first that it could be
completely resolved into stars, about eighteen millions of them; but
later he changed his theory, having found so much nebulous matter--in a
state of condensation as though new worlds were forming, possibly to be
the homes of some new race, or of man in the ages to come.
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 clusters. 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 unassuming and gentle in manner, must have
had a realizing sense of the greatness of his work, for he said, "I
have looked further into space 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 grass.
"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
manuscripts. 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 assurance 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 pass 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 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."
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 snatched 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 circumstance, 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 assure 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
Clusters 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 membership.
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!