TRY.
Can't do it sticks in the mud, but Try soon drags the wagon out of the rut. The fox said Try, and he got away from the hounds when they almost snapped at him. The bees said Try, and turned flowers into honey. The squirrel said Try, and up he went to the top of the beech-tree. The snow-drop said Try, and bloomed in the cold snows of Winter. The sun said Try, and the Spring soon threw Jack Frost out of the saddle. The young lark said Try, and he found his new wings took him over hedges and ditches, and up where his father was singing. The ox said Try, and ploughed the field from end to end. No hill too steep for Try to climb, no clay too stiff for Try to plough, no field too wet for Try to drain, no hole too big for Try to mend. As to a little trouble, who expects to find cherries without stones, or roses without thorns! Who would win must learn to bear. Idleness lies in bed sick of the mulligrubs where industry finds health and wealth. The dog in the kennel barks at the fleas; the hunting dog does not even know they are there. Laziness waits till the river is dry, and never gets to market; "Try" swims it, and makes all the trade. Can't do it couldn't eat the bread and butter which was cut for him, but Try made meat out of mushrooms.
If you want to do good in the world, the little word "Try" comes in again. There are plenty of ways of serving God, and some that will fit you exactly as a key fits a lock. Don't hold back because you can not preach in St. Paul's; be content to talk to one or two in a cottage; very good wheat grows in little fields. You may cook in small pots as well as big ones. Little pigeons can carry great messages. Even a little dog can bark at a thief, and wake up the master and save the house. A spark is fire. A sentence of truth has heaven in it. Do what you do right thoroughly; pray over it heartily, and leave the result to God.
Alas! advice is thrown away on many, like good seed on a bare rock. Teach a cow for seven years, but she will never learn to sing the Old Hundreth. Of some it seems true that when they were born Solomon went by the door, but would not look in. Their coat-of-arms is a fool's cap on a donkey's head. They sleep when it is time to plough, and weep when harvest comes. They eat all the parsnips for supper, and wonder they have none left for breakfast.
Once let every man say Try,
Very few on straw would lie,
Fewer still of want would die;
Pans would all have fish to fry;
Pigs would fill the poor man's sty;
Want would cease and need would fly;
Wives,and children cease to cry;
Poor rates would not swell so high;
Things wouldn't go so much awry--
You'd be glad, and so would I.
XVIII.
CAROLINE LUCRETIA HERSCHEL.
(BORN 1750--DIED 1848)
A NOBLE, SELF-SACRIFICING WOMAN.
March 16, 1750, and January 9, 1848. These are the dates that span the ninety-eight years of the life of a woman whose deeds were great in the service of the world, but of whom the world itself knows all too little. Of the interest attaching to the life of such a woman, whose recollections went back to the great earthquake at Lisbon; who lived through the American War, the old French Revolution, the rise and fall of Napoleon; who saw the development of the great factors of modern civilization, "from the lumbering post wagon in which she made her first journey from Hanover to the railroads and electric telegraphs which have intersected all Europe;" of the interest which such a life possesses, apart from that which attaches to it as that of a noble, self-sacrificing woman, who was content to serve when she might have led in a great cause, but few will be insensible.
Caroline Herschel was born on the 16th of March 1750, and was the eighth child of ten children. Her father, Isaac Herschel, traced his ancestry back to the early part of the seventeenth century, when three brothers Herschel left Moravia through religious differences, they being Protestant. The father, Isaac, was passionately fond of music, to the study of which, as a youth, he devoted himself, and, at the time of his marriage in Hanover, was engaged as hautboy player in the band of the Guards. When, in the course of time, his family grew up around him, each child received an education at the garrison school, to which they were sent between the ages of two and fourteen; and at home the father strove to cultivate the musical talents of his sons, one of whom, William, soon taught his teacher, while another, Jacob, was organist of the garrison church.
Of her very early childhood one gets the impression that Caroline was a quiet, modest little maiden, "deeply interested in all the family concerns," content to be eclipsed by her more brilliant and less patient elder sister, and overlooked by her thoughtless brothers, toward one of whom, William, she already began to cherish that deep affection which she maintained throughout their lives. The lives of this brother and sister, indeed, in this respect, recall to mind those of Charles and Mary Lamb. When she was five years old the family life was disturbed by war, which took away temporarily father and sons, and left the little girl at home, her mother's sole companion. Her recollections of this time are very dismal, and may be read at length in the memoir by Mrs. John Herschel, to which we are indebted for much aid. When she was seventeen her father died, and the polished education which he had hoped to give her was supplanted by the rough but useful knowledge which her mother chose to inculcate in her--an education which was to help to fit her to earn her bread, and to be of great assistance to her beloved brother William. He had now for some years been living at Bath, England, from which he wrote in 1772, proposing that his sister should join him there to assist him in his musical projects, for he had now become a composer and director. In August of this year she accomplished a most adventurous and wearisome journey to London, encountering storms by land and sea, and on the 28th of the month found herself installed in her brother's lodgings at Bath.
It will be necessary here to speak a little more at length of her brother's life as she found it when she joined him, as thereafter her own existence was practically merged in his, and, as she has said modestly of herself and her service: "I did nothing for my brother but what a well-trained puppy-dog would have done; that is to say, I did what he commanded me. I was a mere tool, which he had the trouble of sharpening." Posterity discredits this self-depreciation, while it admires it, and Miss Herschel's services are now esteemed at their true worth. Her brother then, when she came to Bath, had established himself there as a teacher of music, as organist of the Octagon Chapel, and, as we have said before, was a composer and director of more than ordinary merit. This was all a side issue, however. It was but a means to an end. His music was the goose that laid the golden egg, which, once in his possession, he turned over to the mistress of his soul--Astronomy.
Every spare moment of the day, we are told, and many hours stolen from the night, had long been devoted to the studies which were compelling him to become himself an observer of the heavens. He had worked wonders of mechanical invention, forced thereto by necessity; had become a member of a philosophical society, and his name was beginning to be circulated among the great, rumors of his work reaching and arresting even royal attention.
At this point his sister arrived, the quiet domestic life she had been living in Hanover being suddenly changed for one of "ceaseless and inexhaustible activity" in her brother's service, being at once his astronomical and musical assistant, and his housekeeper and guardian. Of the latter, his erratic habits made him in great need. "For ten years she persevered at Bath," says her biographer, "singing when she was told to sing, copying when she was told to copy, 'lending a hand' in the workshop, and taking her full share in all the stirring and exciting changes by which the musician became the king's astronomer and a celebrity; but she never, by a single word, betrays how these wonderful events affected her, nor indulges in the slightest approach to an original sentiment, comment, or reflection not strictly connected with the present fact." In an ordinary case this would not be remarkable, but in the present instance it acquires considerable significance from the fact that, to our best knowledge, Miss Herschel's was a temperament which would be strongly affected by the life she was leading, and her silence as to personal sentiment shows to what an extent she had become a tool in her brother's hands--rejoicing in his successes, and sympathizing in his sorrows, but never revealing to what depth of self-sacrifice she may have been plunged by her voluntary surrender and devotion to her brother.
As we understand her, Miss Herschel would have been eminently fitted to fill a position of high domestic responsibility; and no woman of this sort, who has once dreamed of a home of her own, with its ennobling and divine responsibilities, can, without a pang, give up so sweet a vision for a life of sacrifice, although it be brilliant with the cold splendors of science. Her life with her brother, as has been said, was one of ceaseless activity in all the capacities in which she served him. As housekeeper, she occupied a small room in the attic, while her brother occupied the ground-floor, furnished in new and handsome style. She received a sum for weekly expenses, of which she must keep a careful account, and all the marketing fell to her. She had to struggle with hot-tempered servants, and with the greatest irregularity and disorder in the household; while her imperfect knowledge of English (this was soon after her arrival at Bath) added a new pang to her homesickness and low spirits. Later on, in her capacity as musical assistant, we are told that she once copied the scores of the "Messiah" and "Judas Maccabaeus" into parts for an orchestra of nearly one hundred performers, and the vocal parts of "Samson," besides instructing the treble singers, of whom she was now herself the first. As astronomical assistant, she has herself given a glimpse of her experience in the following words: "In my brother's absence from home, I was, of course, left solely to amuse myself with my own thoughts, which were any thing but cheerful. I found I was to be trained for an assistant astronomer, and, by way of encouragement, a telescope adapted for 'sweeping,' consisting of a tube with two glasses, such as are commonly used in a 'finder,' was given me. I was 'to sweep for comets,' and I see by my journal that I began August 22, 1782, to write down and describe all remarkable appearances I saw in my 'sweeps,' which were horizontal. But it was not till the last two months of the same year that I felt the least encouragement to spend the star-light nights on a grass-plot covered with dew or hoar-frost, without a human being near enough to be within call. I knew too little of the real heavens to be able to point out every object so as to find it again without losing too much time by consulting the atlas." And, in another place, she says: "I had, however, the comfort to see that my brother was satisfied with my endeavors to assist him, when he wanted another person either to run to the clocks, write down a memorandum, fetch and carry instruments, or measure the ground with poles, etc., of which something of the kind every moment would occur." How successful she was in her sky-sweeping may be judged from the fact that she herself discovered no less than eight different comets at various times during her apprenticeship. Her work was not unattended by danger and accidents, and on one occasion, on a cold and cloudy December night, when a strip of clear sky revealed some stars and there was great haste made to observe them, in assisting her brother with his huge telescope she ran in the dark on ground covered with melting snow a foot deep, tripped, and fell on a large iron hook such as butchers use, and which was attached for some purpose to the machine. It entered her right leg, above the knee, and when her brother called, "Make haste," she could only answer by a pitiful cry, "I am hooked." He and the workmen were instantly with her; but they did not free her from the torturing position without leaving nearly two ounces of her flesh behind, and it was long before she was able to take her place again at the instrument.
It would be interesting, if it were but practicable, to give a brief journal of her life during the fifty years she lived in England, from the time of her arrival in Bath, August 28, 1772, till the time of her brother's death, August 25, 1822, after which she returned to Hanover.
We have given enough, perhaps, to suggest the mode and the activity of her life; but of her brother's marriage, and the trial it brought upon her in giving up the supreme place she had held in his love and companionship for sixteen years; of the details of her discoveries, and the interesting correspondence which accompanied them; of her various great and noble friends, and her relations with them; of the death of her brother, then Sir William Herschel, and the terrible blow it proved to her; of her return to Holland, to the home of another brother; of her sorrow and disappointment at the changes which had taken place in the home of her youth during the long years which had brought her to old age--she was then seventy-two--and to face "the blank of life after having lived within the radiance of genius;" of the comfort she derived from the members of her brother's family whom she had left behind in "happy England;" of the honors which the chief scientific men in the kingdom bestowed upon her--of all these matters we can do no more than to simply touch upon them as above, although, if we might refer to them at greater length, it would be but to increase our admiration and esteem for one of the strongest, most serviceable, and most faithful women that ever lived.
She died at eleven o'clock on the night of the 9th of January, 1848, at the age of ninety-eight; and the holy words were spoken in the same little chapel in the garrison in which, "nearly a century before, she had been christened and afterward confirmed." In the coffin with her was placed, at her request, "a lock of her beloved brother's hair, and an old, almost obliterated almanac that had been used by her father;" and with these tokens of the unswerving love and fidelity she had always borne to parent and brother, she was laid away to rest, leaving the memory of a noble woman, great in wisdom, and greater in womanliness, without which, in woman, wisdom is unhallowed.--S.A. CHAPIN, JR., in the Christian Union.