Page:Memoir and correspondence of Caroline Herschel (1876).djvu/173

Rh life, living and toiling for him and him only. "If I should leave off making memorandums of such events as affect, or are interesting to me, I should feel like—what I am, namely, a person that has nothing more to do in this world." Mournful words: doubly mournful when we know that the writer had nearly half an ordinary lifetime still between her and that grave which she made haste to prepare, in the hope that her course was nearly run. Who can think of her, at the age of seventy-two, heart-broken and desolate, going back to the home of her youth in the fond expectation of finding consolation, without a pang of sympathetic pity? She found everything changed. In addition to those changes, for which she might have been in some measure prepared, there were others of a kind to admit of neither cure nor alleviation. The life she had led for fifty years had removed her, she little guessed how much, from the old familiar paths: her thoughts, her habits, all her ideas had been formed and moulded in a totally different world: more bitter still, she found herself alone in her great sorrow and quenchless love; pride in the distinction reflected on themselves from relationship to the illustrious astronomer was a miserable substitute for the reverential affection she had looked to find for one of the kindest and most generous of brothers. But the bitterest suffering of all was from a source which was, and ever remained, beyond the reach of help. "You don't know," wrote one of