Page:Women worth emulating (1877) Internet Archive.djvu/66

50 quaint phrase, "Minded the heavens," and with such success that her watching was rewarded in a very wonderful way. On the 1st of August, 1786, she discovered a comet; and, her brother being abroad, she with characteristic promptitude wrote on the following morning an account of her discovery to two eminent men. Dr. Blagden and Alex. Aubert, Esq., who in a few days congratulated her warmly, the latter saying, "You have immortalized your name; and you deserve such a reward from the Being who has ordered all these things to move as we find them, for your assiduity in the business of astronomy, and for your love for so celebrated and deserving a brother."

From this time, Miss Caroline. Herschel became what, in her humility, she never desired to be—a celebrity. She rather shrunk from any praise of herself, as if it was taken from her brother. He was to her as the sun, and she merely a shadow called up by his brightness. Surely, it was an absurd and exaggerated humility in her to say, "I did nothing for my brother but what a well-trained puppy-dog would have done. I was a mere tool, which he had the trouble of sharpening."

All the thoughtful people of her own time, and still more since the narrative of her life has been given to the world, will not take her own estimate of herself. She achieved individual, quite as much as relative greatness.

Space will not permit me to follow the career of