THE KING’S ASTRONOMER.
William Herschel was now an appendage to the court of George III. He
had to live near Windsor, and a large dilapidated house on Datchet
Common was secured as likely to meet his unusual requirements. The
“flitting” took place August 1, 1782. William was in the highest
spirits. There were stables available for workrooms and furnaces; a
spacious laundry that could be turned into a library; a fine lawn for
the accommodation of the great reflector. Crumbling walls and holes
in the roof gave him little or no concern; and if butcher’s meat was
appallingly dear (as his sister lamented) the family could live on
bacon and eggs! In this sunny spirit he entered upon the career of
untold possibilities that lay before him.
Nevertheless the King’s astronomer did not find it all plain sailing.
His primary duty was to gratify the royal taste for astronomy, and this
involved no trifling expenditure of time and toil. The transport of the
seven-foot to the Queen’s lodge could be managed in the daylight, but
its return-journey in the dark, after the conclusion of the celestial
raree-show, was an expensive and a risky business; yet fetched back it
should be unless a clear night were to be wasted--a thing not possible
to contemplate. This kind of attendance was, however, considerately
dispensed with when its troublesome nature came to be fully understood.
Herschel’s treatment by George III. has often been condemned as
selfish and niggardly; but with scant justice. In some respects, no
doubt, it might advantageously have been modified. Still, the fact
remains that the astronomer of Slough was the gift to science of the
poor mad King. From no other crowned head has it ever received so
incomparable an endowment.
Herschel’s salary was undeniably small. It gave him the means of
living, but not of observing, as he proposed to observe. If the
improvement of telescopes were to be “carried to its utmost limit,”
additional funds must be raised. Without an ample supply of the “sinews
of war,” fresh campaigns of exploration were out of the question. There
was one obvious way in which they could be provided. Herschel’s fame as
an optician was spread throughout Europe. His telescopes were wanted
everywhere, but could be had from himself alone; for the methods by
which he wrought specula to a perfect figure are even now undivulged.
They constituted, therefore, a source of profit upon which he could
draw to almost any extent. He applied himself, accordingly, to make
telescopes for sale. They brought in large sums. Six hundred guineas
a-piece were paid to him by the King for four ten-foot reflectors; he
received at a later date £3,150 for a twenty-five foot, sent to Spain;
and in 1814 £2,310 from Lucien Bonaparte for two smaller instruments.
The regular scale of prices (later considerably reduced) began with 200
guineas for a seven-foot, and mounted to 2,500 for a twenty-foot; and
the commissions executed were innumerable.
But Herschel did not come into the world to drive a lucrative trade.
It was undertaken, not for itself, but for what was to come of it; yet
there was danger lest the end should be indefinitely postponed in the
endeavour to secure the means.
“It seemed to be supposed,” Miss Herschel remarked, “that enough had
been done when my brother was enabled to leave his profession that he
might have time to make and sell telescopes. But all this was only
retarding the work of a thirty or forty-foot instrument, which it was
his chief object to obtain as soon as possible; for he was then on the
wrong side of forty-five, and felt how great an injustice he would be
doing to himself and the cause of astronomy by giving up his time to
making telescopes for other observers.”
This he was, fortunately, not long obliged to do. A royal grant of
£2,000 for the construction of the designed giant telescope, followed
by another of equal amount, together with an annual allowance of
£200 for its repairs, removed the last obstacle to his success. The
wide distribution of first-class instruments might, indeed, have
been thought to promise more for the advancement of astronomy than
the labours of a single individual. No mistake could be greater. Not
an observation worth mentioning was made with any of the numerous
instruments sent out from Datchet or Slough, save only those acquired
by Schröter and Pond. The rest either rusted idly, or were employed
ineffectually, aptly illustrating the saying that “the man at the
eye-end” is the truly essential part of a telescope.
No one knew this better than Herschel. Every serene dark night was
to him a precious opportunity availed of to the last minute. The
thermometer might descend below zero, ink might freeze, mirrors might
crack; but, provided the stars shone, he and his sister worked on
from dusk to dawn. In this way, his “third review,” begun at Bath,
was finished in the spring of 1783. The swiftness with which it was
conducted implied no want of thoroughness. “Many a night,” he states,
“in the course of eleven or twelve hours of observation, I have
carefully and singly examined not less than 400 celestial objects,
besides taking measures, and sometimes viewing a particular star for
half an hour together, with all the various powers.”
The assiduity appears well-nigh incredible with which he gathered in
an abundant harvest of nebulæ and double stars; his elaborate papers,
brimful of invention and experience, being written by day, or during
nights unpropitious for star-gazing. On one occasion he is said to
have worked without intermission at the telescope and the desk for
seventy-two hours, and then slept unbrokenly for twenty-six hours. His
instruments were never allowed to remain disabled. They were kept,
like himself, on the alert. Relays of specula were provided, and one
was in no case removed from the tube for re-polishing, unless another
was ready to take its place. Even the meetings of the Royal Society
were attended only when moonlight effaced the delicate objects of his
particular search.
The summer of 1788 was spent in getting ready the finest telescope
Herschel had yet employed. It was called the “large twenty-foot”
because of the size of its speculum, which was nearly nineteen inches
in diameter; and with its potent help he executed his fourth and
last celestial survey. His impatience to begin led him into perilous
situations.
“My brother,” says Miss Herschel, “began his series of 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 crack or
fall, knowing him to be elevated fifteen feet or more on a temporary
cross-beam 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. Some labouring
men were called up to help in extricating the mirror, which was
fortunately uninjured, but much work was cut out for carpenters next
day.”
In the following March, he himself wrote to Patrick Wilson, of Glasgow,
son of Dr. Alexander Wilson, the well-known professor of astronomy:--“I
have finished a second speculum to my new twenty-foot, very much
superior to the first, and am now reviewing the heavens with it. This
will be a work of some years; but it is to me so far from laborious
that it is attended with the utmost delight.” He, nevertheless, looked
upon telescopes as “yet in their infant state.”
The ruinous mansion at Datchet having become uninhabitable, even
by astronomers, their establishment was shifted, in June, 1785, to
Clay Hall, near Old Windsor. Here the long-thought-of forty-foot was
begun, but was not destined to be finished. A litigious landlady
intervened. The next move, however, proved to be the last. It was to
a commodious residence at Slough, now called “Observatory House”--“le
lieu du monde,” wrote Arago, “où il a été fait le plus de découvertes.”
Thither, without the loss of an hour, in April, 1786, the machinery and
apparatus collected at Clay Hall were transported. Yet, “amidst all
this hurrying business,” Caroline remembered “that every moment after
daylight was allotted to observing. The last night at Clay Hall was
spent in sweeping till daylight, and by the next evening the telescope
stood ready for observation at Slough.”
During the ensuing three months, thirty to forty workmen were
constantly employed, “some in felling and rooting out trees, some in
digging and preparing the ground for the bricklayers who were laying
the foundation for the telescope.” “A whole troop of labourers” were,
besides, engaged in reducing “the iron tools to a proper shape for the
mirror to be ground upon.” Thus, each morning, when dawn compelled
Herschel to desist from observation, he found a bevy of people awaiting
instructions of all sorts from him. “If it had not been,” his sister
says, “for the intervention of a cloudy or moonlit night, I know not
when he, or I either, should have got any sleep.” The wash-house was
turned into a forge for the manufacture of specially designed tools;
heavy articles cast in London were brought by water to Windsor; the
library was so encumbered with stores, models, and implements, that “no
room for a desk or an atlas remained.”
On July 3rd, 1786, Herschel, accompanied by his brother Alexander,
started for Göttingen, commissioned by the King to present to the
University one of the ten-foot reflectors purchased from him. He was
elected a Member of the Royal Society of Göttingen, and spent three
weeks at Hanover with his aged mother, whom he never saw again. During
his absence, however, the forty-foot progressed in accordance with
the directions he had taken care to leave behind. He trusted nothing
to chance. “There is not one screwbolt,” his sister asserted, “about
the whole apparatus but what was fixed under the immediate eye of
my brother. I have seen him lie stretched many an hour in a burning
sun, across the top beam, whilst the iron-work for the various motions
was being fixed. At one time no less than twenty-four men (twelve and
twelve relieving each other) kept polishing day and night; my brother,
of course, never leaving them all the while, taking his food without
allowing himself time to sit down to table.”
At this stage of the undertaking it became the fashion with visitors to
use the empty tube as a promenade. Dr. and Miss Burney called, in July,
1786, “to see, and _take a walk_ through the immense new telescope.”
“It held me quite upright,” the authoress of “Evelina” related, “and
without the least inconvenience; so would it have done had I been
dressed in feathers and a bell-hoop.”
George III. and the Archbishop of Canterbury followed the general
example; and the prelate being incommoded by the darkness and the
uncertain footing, the King, who was in front, turned back to help him,
saying: “Come, my lord bishop, I will show you the way to heaven.” On
another occasion “God save the King” was sung and played within the
tube by a large body of musicians; and the rumour went abroad that it
had been turned into a ball-room!
The University of Oxford conferred upon Herschel, in 1786, an honorary
degree of LL.D.; but he cared little for such distinctions. Miss
Burney characterised him as a “man without a wish that has its object
in the terrestrial globe;” the King had “not a happier subject.” The
royal bounty, she went on “enables him to put into execution all his
wonderful projects, from which his expectations of future discoveries
are so sanguine as to make his present existence a state of almost
perfect enjoyment.” Nor was it possible to “admire his genius more
than his gentleness.” Again, after taking tea in his company in the
Queen’s lodge: “this very extraordinary man has not more fame to
awaken curiosity than sense and modesty to gratify it. He is perfectly
unassuming, yet openly happy; and happy in the success of those studies
which would render a mind less excellently formed presumptuous and
arrogant.” Mrs. Papendick, another court chronicler, says that “he was
fascinating in his manner, and possessed a natural politeness, and the
abilities of a superior nature.”
His great telescope took rank, before and after its completion, as the
chief scientific wonder of the age. Slough was crowded with sightseers.
All the ruck of Grand Dukes and Serene Highnesses from abroad, besides
royal, noble, and gentle folk at home, flocked to gaze at it and
interrogate its maker with ignorant or intelligent wonder. The Prince
of Orange was a particularly lively inquirer. On one of his calls at
Slough, about ten years after the erection of the forty-foot, finding
the house vacant, he left a memorandum asking if it were true, as the
newspapers reported, that “Mr. Herschel had discovered a new star whose
light was not as that of the common stars, but with swallow-tails, as
stars in embroidery?”!
Pilgrim-astronomers came, too--Cassini, Lalande, Méchain and Legendre
from Paris, Oriani from Milan, Piazzi from Palermo. Sniadecki, director
of the observatory of Cracow, “took lodgings,” Miss Herschel relates,
“in Slough, for the purpose of seeing and hearing my brother whenever
he could find him at leisure. He was a very silent man.” One cannot
help fearing that he was also a very great bore. Von Magellan, another
eminent foreign astronomer, communicated to Bode an interesting account
of Herschel’s methods of observation. The multitude of entries in his
books astonished him. In sweeping, he reported, “he lets each star pass
at least three times through the field of his telescope, so that it is
impossible that anything can escape him.” The thermometer in the garden
stood that night, January 6th, 1785, at 13 deg. Fahrenheit; but the
royal astronomer, his visitor remarked, “has an excellent constitution,
and thinks about nothing else in the world but the celestial bodies.”
In January, 1787, Herschel made trial with his twenty-foot reflector
of the “front-view” plan of construction, suggested by Lemaire in
1732, but never before practically tested. All that had to be done
was to remove the small mirror, and slightly _tilt_ the large one.
The image was then formed close to the upper margin of the tube, into
which the observer, turning his back to the heavens, looked down. The
purpose of the arrangement was to save the light lost in the second
reflection; and its advantage was at once illustrated by the discovery
of two Uranian moons--one (Titania) circling round its primary in about
8¾ hours, the other (Oberon) in 13½ hours. In order to assure these
conclusions, he made a sketch beforehand of what _ought_ to be seen on
February 10th; and on that night, to his intense satisfaction, “the
heavens,” as he informed the Royal Society, “displayed the original of
my drawing by showing, in the situation I had delineated them, _the
Georgian planet attended by two satellites_. I confess that this scene
appeared to me with additional beauty, the little secondary planets
seeming to give a dignity to the primary one which raises it into a
more conspicuous situation among the great bodies of our solar system.”
This brilliant result determined him to make a “front-view” of
the forty-foot. Its advance towards completion was not without
vicissitudes. The first speculum, when put into the tube, February
19th 1787, was found too thin to maintain its shape. A second, cast
early in 1788, cracked in cooling. The same metal having been recast
February 16th, the artist tried it upon Saturn in October; but the
effect disappointing his expectation, he wrought at it for ten months
longer. At last, after a few days’ polishing with his new machine, he
turned the great speculum towards Windsor Castle; when its high quality
became at once manifest. And such was his impatience to make with it
a crucial experiment, that--as he told Sir Joseph Banks--he directed
it to the heavens (August 28th, 1789) before it had half come to its
proper lustre. The stars came out well, and no sooner had he got hold
of Saturn than a sixth satellite stood revealed to view! Its “younger
brother” was detected September 17th; and the two could be seen, on
favourable opportunities, threading their way, like beads of light,
along the lucid line of the almost vanished ring. Herschel named them
Enceladus and Mimas, and found, on looking up his former observations
of Saturn, that Enceladus, the exterior and brighter object, had been
unmistakably seen with the twenty-foot, August 19th, 1787. Mimas is a
very delicate test of instrumental perfection.
The mirror by which it was first shown measured nearly fifty inches
across, and weighed 2,118 pounds. It was slung in a ring, and the
sheet-iron tube in which it rested was thirty-nine and a-half feet
long and four feet ten inches wide. Ladders fifty feet in length
gave access to a movable stage, from which the observer communicated
through speaking tubes with his assistants. The whole erection stood
on a revolving platform; for the modern equatorial form of mount, by
which the diurnal course of the heavens is automatically followed, was
not then practically available, and the necessary movements had to be
imparted by hand. This involved the attendance of two workmen, but was
otherwise less inconvenient than might be supposed, owing to the skill
with which the required mechanism was contrived.
Herschel estimated that, with a magnifying-power of 1,000, this grand
instrument could, in the climate of England, be effectively used during
no more than one hundred hours of every year. A review with it of the
whole heavens would hence have occupied eight centuries. In point of
fact, he found the opportunities for its employment scarce. The machine
took some time to get started, while the twenty-foot was ready in ten
minutes. The speculum, moreover, proved unpleasantly liable to become
dewed in moist weather, or frozen up in cold; and, in spite of all
imaginable care, it preserved the delicacy of its polish no more than
two years. An economist of minutes, such as its maker, could, then,
do no otherwise than let the giant telescope lie by unless its powers
were expressly needed. They were surprisingly effective. “With the
forty-foot instrument,” he reported to the Royal Society in 1800, “the
appearance of Sirius announced itself at a great distance like the dawn
of the morning, till this brilliant star at last entered the field,
with all the splendour of the rising sun, and forced me to take my eye
from that beautiful sight.” Which, however, left the vision impaired
in delicacy for nigh upon half-an-hour.
Thus the results gathered from the realisation of Herschel’s crowning
optical achievement fell vastly short of what his imagination had
pictured. The promise of the telescope’s initial disclosures was not
realised in its subsequent career. Yet it was a superb instrument.
The discovery with it of Mimas gave certain proof that the figure of
the speculum was as perfect as its dimensions were unusual. But its
then inimitable definition probably fell off later. Its “broad bright
eye” was, for the last time, turned towards the heavens January 19th,
1811, when the Orion nebula showed its silvery wings to considerable
advantage. But incurable dimness had already set in--incurable, because
the artist’s hand had no longer the strength needed to cure the growing
malady. The big machine was, however, left standing, framework and all.
It figured as a landmark on the Ordnance Survey Map of England; and,
stamped in miniature on the seal of the Royal Astronomical Society,
aptly serves to illustrate its motto, “_Quicquid nitet notandum_.”
At last, on New Years Eve, 1839, the timbers of the scaffolding
being dangerously decayed, it was, with due ceremony, dismounted. A
“Requiem,” composed by Sir John Herschel, was sung by his family,
fourteen in number, assembled within the tube, which was then riveted
up and laid horizontally on three stone piers in the garden at Slough.
“It looks very well in its new position,” Sir John thought. Yet it has
something of a _memento mori_ aspect. It seems to remind one that the
loftiest human aspirations are sprinkled “with the dust of death.” The
speculum adorns the hall of Observatory House.
Herschel married, May 8th, 1788, Mary, the only child of Mr. James
Baldwin, a merchant in the City of London, and widow of Mr. John Pitt.
She was thirty-eight and he fifty. Her jointure relieved him from
pecuniary care, and her sweetness of disposition secured his domestic
happiness. They set up a curious double establishment, taking a house
at Upton, while retaining that at Slough. Two maidservants were kept
in each, and a footman maintained the communications. So at least runs
Mrs. Papendick’s gossip. Miss Burney records in her Diary a tea at Mr.
De Luc’s, where Dr. Herschel accompanied a pair of vocalists “very
sweetly on the violin. His newly-married wife was with him, and his
sister. His wife seems good-natured; she was rich, too! And astronomers
are as able as other men to discern that gold can glitter as well as
stars.”
He was now at the height of prosperity and renown. Diplomas innumerable
were showered upon him by Academies and learned societies. In a letter
to Benjamin Franklin, he returned thanks for his election as a member
of the American Philosophical Society, and acquainted him with his
recent detection of a pair of attendants on the “Georgian planet.”
A similar acknowledgment was addressed to the Princess Daschkoff,
Directress of the Petersburg Academy of Sciences. The King of Poland
sent him his portrait; the Empress Catherine II. opened negotiations
for the purchase of some of his specula, Lucien Bonaparte repaired
to Slough incognito; Joseph Haydn snatched a day from the turmoil
of his London engagements to visit the musician-astronomer, and
gaze at his monster telescopes. By universal agreement, Dr. Burney
declared, Herschel was “one of the most pleasing and well-bred natural
characters of the day, as well as the greatest astronomer.” They had
much in common, according to Dr. Burney’s daughter. Both possessed an
uncommon “suavity of disposition”; both loved music; and Dr. Burney had
a “passionate inclination for astronomy.” They became friends through
the medium of Dr. Burney’s versified history of that science. In
September, 1797, he called at Slough with the manuscript in his valise.
“The good soul was at dinner,” he relates; and, to his surprise, since
he was ignorant of Herschel’s marriage, the company included several
ladies, besides “a little boy.” He was, nothing loth, compelled to stay
over-night; discussed with his host the plan of his work, and read to
him its eighth chapter. Herschel listened with interest, and modestly
owned to having learnt much from what he had heard; but presently
dismayed the author by confessing his “aversion to poetry,” which
he had generally regarded as “an arrangement of fine words without
any adherence to the truth.” He added, however, that “when truth and
science were united to those fine words,” they no longer displeased
him. The readings continued at intervals, alternately at Slough and
Chelsea, to the immense gratification of the copious versifier, who
occasionally allowed his pleasure to overflow in his correspondence.
“Well, but Herschel has been in town,” he wrote from Chelsea College,
December 10th, 1798, “for short spurts and back again, two or three
times, and I have had him here two whole days. I read to him the first
five books without any one objection.” And again; “He came, and his
good wife accompanied him, and I read four and a-half books; and on
parting, still more humble than before, or still more amiable, he
thanked me for the instruction and entertainment I had given him. What
say you to that? Can anything be grander?”
In spite of his “aversion,” Herschel had once, and once only, wooed the
coy muse himself. The first evening paper that appeared in England, May
3rd, 1788, contained some introductory quatrains by him. An excuse for
this unwonted outburst may be found in the circumstance that the sheet
in which they were printed bore the name of _The Star_. They began with
the interrogation:
“What Star art thou, about to gleam
In Novelty’s bright hemisphere?”
and continued:
“A Planet wilt thou roll sublime,
Spreading like Mercury thy rays?
Or chronicle the lapse of Time,
Wrapped in a Comet’s threatening blaze?”
That they are of the schoolboy order need surprise no one. Such a mere
sip at the “Pierian spring” could scarcely bring inspiration.
Herschel’s grand survey of the heavens closed with his fourth review.
His telescopic studies thereupon became specialised. The sun, the
planets and their satellites, the lately discovered asteroids, certain
double stars, and an occasional comet, in turn received attention.
Laboratory experiments were also carried on, and discussions of
profound importance were laid before the Royal Society. All this
cost him but little effort. The high tension of his earlier life was
somewhat relaxed; he allowed himself intervals of rest, and indulged
in social and musical recreations. Concerts were now frequently given
at his house; and the face of beaming delight with which he presided
over them is still traditionally remembered. Visits to Sir William
Watson at Dawlish gave him opportunities, otherwise rare, for talks on
metaphysical subjects; and he stayed with James Watt at Heathfield in
1810. He had been a witness on his side in an action for infringement
of patent in 1793.
Herschel rented a house on Sion Hill, Bath, for some months of the year
1799; and from time to time stayed with friends in London, or sought
change of air at Tunbridge Wells, Brighton, or Ramsgate. In July,
1801, he went to Paris with his wife and son, made acquaintance with
Laplace, and had an interview with the First Consul. It was currently
reported that Bonaparte had astonished him by the extent of his
astronomical learning; but the contrary was the truth. He had tried to
be impressive, but failed. Herschel gave an account of what passed to
the poet Campbell, whom he met at Brighton in 1813.
“The First Consul,” he said, “did surprise me by his quickness and
versatility on all subjects; but in science he seemed to know little
more than any well-educated gentleman; and of astronomy much less,
for instance, than our own king. His general air was something like
affecting to know more than he did know.” Herschel’s election in 1802
as one of the eight foreign Associates of the French Institute was
probably connected with his Parisian experiences.
He inspired Campbell with the most lively enthusiasm. “His simplicity,”
he wrote, “his kindness, his anecdotes, his readiness to explain--and
make perfectly conspicuous too--his own sublime conceptions of the
universe, are indescribably charming. He is seventy-six, but fresh
and stout; and there he sat, nearest the door at his friend’s house,
alternately smiling at a joke, or contentedly sitting without share
or notice in the conversation. Any train of conversation he follows
implicitly; anything you ask, he labours with a sort of boyish
earnestness to explain. Speaking of himself, he said, with a modesty of
manner which quite overcame me, when taken together with the greatness
of the assertion, ‘I have looked further into space than ever human
being did before me; I have observed stars, of which the light, it can
be proved, must take two millions of years to reach this earth.’ I
really and unfeignedly felt at the moment as if I had been conversing
with a supernatural intelligence. ‘Nay, more,’ said he, ‘if those
distant bodies had ceased to exist two millions of years ago we should
still see them, as the light would travel after the body was gone.’
These were Herschel’s words; and if you had heard him speak them, you
would not think he was apt to tell more than the truth.”
The appearance of a bright comet, in October, 1806, drew much company
to Slough. On the 4th, Miss Herschel narrates, “Two parties from the
Castle came to see it, and during the whole month my brother had not
an evening to himself. As he was then in the midst of polishing the
forty-foot mirror, rest became absolutely necessary after a day spent
in that most laborious work; and it has ever been my opinion that on
the 14th of October his nerves received a shock from which he never
got the better afterwards; for on that day he had hardly dismissed
his troop of men when visitors assembled, and from the time it was
dark, till past midnight, he was on the grass-plot surrounded by
between fifty and sixty persons, without having had time to put on
proper clothing, or for the least nourishment to pass his lips. Among
the company I remember were the Duke of Sussex, Prince Galitzin, Lord
Darnley, a number of officers, Admiral Boston, and some ladies.”
A dangerous attack of illness in the spring of 1807 left Herschel’s
strength permanently impaired. But he travelled to Scotland in the
summer of 1810, and received the freedom of the City of Glasgow.
Then, in 1814, he made a final, but fruitless attempt, to renovate
the four-foot speculum. In the midst of the confusion attending upon
the process, word was given to prepare for the reception of the Czar
Alexander, the Duchess of Oldenburg, and sundry other grandees just
then collected at Windsor for the Ascot races. The setting to rights
was no small job; “but we might have saved ourselves the trouble,” his
sister remarks drily, “for they were sufficiently harassed with public
sights and festivities.”
On April 5th, 1816, Herschel was created a Knight of the Royal
Hanoverian Guelphic Order, and duly attended one of the Prince Regent’s
levées in May. He went to town in 1819 to have his portrait painted
by Artaud. The resulting fine likeness is in the possession of his
grandson, Sir William James Herschel. The Astronomical Society chose
him as its first President in 1821; and he contributed to the first
volume of its memoirs a supplementary list of 145 double stars. The
wonderful series of his communications to the Royal Society closed
when he was in his eightieth year, with the presentation, June 11th,
1818, of a paper on the Relative Distances of Star-clusters. On June
1st, 1821, he inserted into the tube with thin and trembling hands
the mirror of the twenty-foot telescope, and took his final look at
the heavens. All his old instincts were still alive, only the bodily
power to carry out their behests was gone. An unparalleled career of
achievement left him unsatisfied with what he had done. Old age brought
him no Sabbath rest, but only an enforced and wearisome cessation from
activity. His inability to re-polish the four-foot speculum was the
doom of his _chef d’œuvre_. He could not reconcile himself to it. His
sunny spirits gave way. The old happy and buoyant temperament became
overcast with despondency. His strong nerves were at last shattered.
On August 15th, 1822, Miss Herschel relates:--“I hastened to the spot
where I was wont to find him with the newspaper I was to read to him.
But I was informed my brother had been obliged to return to his room,
whither I flew immediately. Lady Herschel and the housekeeper were with
him, administering everything which could be thought of for supporting
him. I found him much irritated at not being able to grant Mr.
Bulman’s[C] request for some token of remembrance for his father. 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 workrooms never
ended but with his life, was proved by his whispered inquiries if they
were locked, and the key safe.”
[C] The grandson of one of Herschel’s earliest English friends.
He died ten days later, August 25th, 1822. Above his grave, in the
church of Saint Laurence at Upton, the words are graven:--“Coelorum
perrupit claustra”--He broke through the barriers of the skies.
William Herschel was endowed by nature with an almost faultless
character. He had the fervour, without the irritability of genius; he
was generous, genial, sincere; tolerant of ignorance; patient under the
acute distress, to which his situation rendered him peculiarly liable,
of unseasonable interruptions at critical moments: he was warm-hearted
and open-handed. His change of country and condition, his absorption
in science, the homage paid to him, never led him to forget the claims
of kindred. Time and money were alike lavished in the relief of family
necessities. He supported his brother Alexander after his retirement
from the concert-stage in 1816, until his death at Hanover, March 15th,
1821. Dietrich’s recurring misfortunes met his unfailing pity and
help. He bequeathed to him a sum of £2,000, and to his devoted sister,
Caroline, an annuity of £100.
His correspondents, abroad and at home, were numerous; nor did he
disdain to remove the perplexities of amateurs. In a letter, dated
January 6th, 1794, we find him explaining to Mr. J. Miller of Lincoln’s
Inn, “the circumstances which attend the motion of a race-horse upon
a circle of longitude.” And he wrote shortly afterwards to Mr. Smith
of Tewkesbury:--“You find fault with the principles of gravitation
and projection because they will not account for the rotation of the
planets upon their axes. You might certainly with as much reason find
fault with your shoes because they will not likewise serve your hands
as gloves. But, in my opinion, the projectile motion once admitted,
sufficiently explains the rotatory motion; for it is hardly possible
mechanically to impress the one without giving the other at the same
time.”
On religious topics he was usually reticent; but a hint of the reverent
spirit in which his researches were conducted may be gathered from
a sentence in the same letter. “It is certainly,” he said, “a very
laudable thing to receive instruction from the great workmaster of
nature, and for that reason all experimental philosophy is instituted.”
To investigate was then, in his view, to “receive instruction”; and one
of the secrets of his wonderful success lay in the docility with which
he came to be taught.