Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 128.djvu/829

Rh in one of her letters in after life she says that when her salary "had fallen nine quarters in arrears" her brother and Lady Herschel insisted that she should receive from them the sum of ten pounds a quarter. The birth of her nephew and his early promise, so splendidly fulfilled, of becoming in all respects worthy of his father, helped to heal and to fill her wounded heart. By degrees she was won to love her brother's wife, and after his death she addresses her as the "dear sister I now feel you to be," and Caroline Herschel was a sister worth winning. For some years before her brothers death they became firm friends, and whenever Lady Herschel was from home, Caroline went to be with her brother and to take care of him as of old; her labours had never been remitted, the work was a bond between them that had never been loosened.

The death of her beloved brother in 1822 was a sorrow that dislocated the remainder of her life. Broken as she was by fatigue and overwork, she believed and hoped she should not long survive him, and under the shock of her great grief she took a step which she regretted only once, but that was always — she was obstinately bent on returning to Hanover to reside for the rest of her days. To make her determination irrevocable, she made a gift of all she possessed to her youngest brother Dietrich and promised to take up her abode henceforth under his roof. Next to William he had been her favourite, and much of the motherliness of her nature had come out towards him; from the time she had nursed him as a baby in the cradle to the time when, after he had run away from home, he had been found sick and destitute at a lodging in Wapping and had been brought back to health by her "on a diet of roasted apples and barley water," and when later, he had come to her "broken in health, spirit, and fortune," she had always been the one to comfort and help him. He had possessed much of the musical talents of the family, and had given promise of becoming an eminent performer on the violin, but he seems never to have done much good; his sister clung to him, however, and believed in him as a man capable of advising her on all matters of business. To Dietrich she committed herself when all her happiness and hope in life went down in her brother's grave.

Everything seems to have been said and done that was possible to induce her to remain in England with those who loved her and knew her value, and amongst the friends she had made in the scientific world, but all was in vain. Dietrich came from Hanover to fetch her, and she returned with him.

From the day of her departure to the day of her death she never ceased to regret what she had done, and, what was more, she owned her mistake. For fifty years she had lived in constant intercourse with men of the highest rank in science; she had spent her whole time in assisting and sharing in the grandest astronomical discoveries, not minding meaner things. In old age she returned to the city where she was born, expecting, to find amongst the relations who had grown up in her absence, as many estimable persons as there were individuals. She found instead, that she was unfitted for their society as they were for hers. While she "had been minding the heavens," they had lived in narrow streets and in a narrow range of interests; she had revered and understood her brother's worth; they who had never known him, felt only a gratified vanity in owning so distinguished a relative. Shut up in a room whence she could not "see an entire constellation," nor scarcely a star; homesick, after the dear ones she had left; lonely among her stranger kinsfolk; pestered by the interference and pretentiousness of her brother Dietrich, whose faith in his sister's superiority had been altogether destroyed by the course she had taken in giving him all she possessed and making him her adviser, she found herself very unhappy indeed.

But more bitter than any personal disappointment was the consciousness which after a while made itself felt, that she had thrown up work while she had still the strength to do it; that she was letting talents which would have been useful to her brother's son rust in disuse. This was what gave bitterness to her regret: there is no remorse like that caused by the sense of talents unemployed. It was not the deficiencies or stupidities of those she had come to dwell amongst that caused Caroline Herschel to become bitter in her complaints, the fault lay in herself, and she knew it: she believed it was too late to return, and bent herself to endure and to await the end, which seemed as though it would never arrive. Lady Herschel, her nephew, and her nephew's wife, when he took one, kept up a close and affectionate correspondence.