Page:Williamherschel00simegoog.djvu/51

Rh would have assured her a respectable, if not a handsome income, had her voice been cultivated, as it was not. Others of the family, reading her Memoirs, appear to have shared her sentiments. It is very doubtful. Her brother William—"best and dearest of brothers"—must have thought otherwise, when he allowed her music lessons to be hindered by marketing, incompetent servants, and other trifles.

The story told by Herschel himself of his struggles in Bath and afterwards, if less racy, is certainly more wonderful. Encouragement he seems to have had from no one, not even from Caroline, who submitted, not without grumbling, to his whims or caprice.

He was pursuing his studies with a devotion which, to one who reads the papers he afterwards wrote, calls to mind the devotion of the patriarch in pursuit of his mistress's love. "In the day the drought consumed me, and the frost by night; and my sleep departed from mine eyes." Most literally true was this as a picture of the astronomer's labours at Bath. "The tube of my seven-feet telescope is covered with ice" is his journal entry one autumn night. A month later he writes, "It freezes very hard, and the stars are very tremulous." Two months later, in midwinter, we read, "Not only my breath freezes upon the side of the tube, but more than once have I found my feet fastened to the ground, when I have looked long at the same star." On removing to Windsor, there was no falling away in his devotion to this imperious mistress. "At four o'clock in the morning," he writes on New Year's Day 1783, "my ink was frozen in the room; and, about five o'clock, a twenty-feet speculum, in the tube, went off with a