Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/665

Rh Herschel married. His wife was a lady of great amiability, and she brought him a fortune which enabled him thenceforth to pursue his scientific career without any anxiety about money matters. Sir William was made happy, but it was the great grief of Caroline Herschel's life. She resigned, as she said, her position as housekeeper, and lived henceforth in lodgings, coming every day to her work, and in all respects continuing the same labours, as her brother's assistant and secretary:—

But [says the authoress of the memoir] it is not to be supposed that a nature so strong and a heart so affectionate should accept the new state of things without much and bitter suffering. To resign the supreme place by her brother's side which she had filled for sixteen years with such hearty devotion could not be otherwise than painful in any case; but how much more so in this where equal devotion to the same pursuit must have made identity of interest and purpose as complete as it is rare! One who could both feel and express herself so strongly was not likely to fall into her new place without some outward expression of what it cost her—tradition confirms the assumption, and it is easy to understand how this long significant silence is due to the light of later wisdom and calmer judgment, which counselled the destruction of all record of what was likely to be painful to survivors.

It is evident from her diary, which was resumed in 1798—though the entries thenceforward are exceedingly brief and business-like—that she never lived beneath her brother's roof again. During his absence from home she would go to his house and put things in order for him; little passages show that at such times she was always at work for him, polishing the brass-work of his telescopes, making curtains for his bookshelves, cataloguing his books and papers; but the day before his expected return she would go back to her lodgings again, whence she would emerge only at nightfall to take her share of the duty of "minding the heavens," as she used to call it. Her brother made her a new telescope, which to the end of his life was her most cherished possession. Letter after letter she used to write during her old age, making arrangements that it should be in safe hands, which would use it tenderly when she was dead. Its ultimate fate is thus spoken of in a letter from Sir John Herschel: —

The telescopes are now, I trust, properly disposed of. Mr. Hausmann (who will value it) has the sweeper. The five-feet Newtonian reflector is in the hands of the Royal Astronomical Society, and it will be preserved by it, as the little telescope of Newton is by the Royal Society, long after I and all the little ones are dead and gone.

The ten years which succeeded her brother's marriage were among the most laborious of Caroline Herschel's life. The Royal Society published two of her works, namely, "A Catalogue of 860 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 British Catalogue." But the most laborious, as well as the most valuable, of her works was the "Reduction and Arrangement in the form of a Catalogue of all the Star-clusters and Nebulæ observed by Sir William Herschel in his Sweeps." It was for this that the gold medal of the Royal Astronomical Society was conferred upon her, and the extraordinary distinction of an honorary membership.

We cannot follow Sir William Herschel through the laborious years which followed. They were a time of intense activity. Not a year passed that he did not signalize with some important memoir in the "Philosophical Transactions." He demonstrated what had hitherto been only suspected, that the sun was not the stable centre of the universe, but that it, together with the planets which form the solar system, was changing its position among the stars. He showed that the direction of our course through space—in company with the sun, our master, and the planets, our companions—is in the direction of the constellation Hercules. It is a fact calculated strongly to impress the imagination, that the sun himself is but a star, among millions brighter, probably, and grander than himself, and that he and all his system of attendant worlds are darting with inconceivable rapidity towards a definite point in space. The establishment of this circumstance in the orderly organization of the universe would alone have made Herschel's name famous. But it is thrown into the shade by other discoveries still more calculated to strike the mind with awe.

There is no branch of astronomy which Herschel might more justly claim for his own domain than that which relates to clustered stars. The catalogue of Meissier contained but sixty-eight nebulæ, to which Lacaille afterwards added twenty-eight, and they were looked upon as mere LIVING AGE.