Herschel estimated that, with a magnifying-power of 1,000, this grand instrument could, in the climate of England, be effectively used during no more than one hundred hours of every year. A review with it of the whole heavens would hence have occupied eight centuries. In point of fact, he found the opportunities for its employment scarce. The machine took some time to get started, while the twenty-foot was ready in ten minutes. The speculum, moreover, proved unpleasantly liable to become dewed in moist weather, or frozen up in cold; and, in spite of all imaginable care, it preserved the delicacy of its polish no more than two years. An economist of minutes, such as its maker, could, then, do no otherwise than let the giant telescope lie by unless its powers were expressly needed. They were surprisingly effective. “With the forty-foot instrument,” he reported to the Royal Society in 1800, “the appearance of Sirius announced itself at a great distance like the dawn of the morning, till this brilliant star at last entered the field, with all the splendour of the rising sun, and forced me to take my eye from that beautiful sight.” Which, however, left the vision impaired in delicacy for nigh upon half-an-hour.
Thus the results gathered from the realisation of Herschel’s crowning optical achievement fell vastly short of what his imagination had pictured. The promise of the telescope’s initial disclosures was not realised in its subsequent career. Yet it was a superb instrument. The discovery with it of Mimas gave certain proof that the figure of the speculum was as perfect as its dimensions were unusual. But its then inimitable definition probably fell off later. Its “broad bright eye” was, for the last time, turned towards the heavens January 19th, 1811, when the Orion nebula showed its silvery wings to considerable advantage. But incurable dimness had already set in—incurable, because the artist’s hand had no longer the strength needed to cure the growing malady. The big machine was, however, left standing, framework and all. It figured as a landmark on the Ordnance Survey Map of England; and, stamped in miniature on the seal of the Royal Astronomical Society, aptly serves to illustrate its motto, “Quicquid nitet notandum.” At last, on New Years Eve, 1839, the timbers of the scaffolding being dangerously decayed, it was, with due ceremony, dismounted. A “Requiem,” composed by Sir John Herschel, was sung by his family, fourteen in number, assembled within the tube, which was then riveted up and laid horizontally on three stone piers in the garden at Slough. “It looks very well in its new position,” Sir John thought. Yet it has something of a memento mori aspect. It seems to remind one that the loftiest human aspirations are sprinkled “with the dust of death.” The speculum adorns the hall of Observatory House.
Herschel married, May 8th, 1788, Mary, the only child of Mr. James Baldwin, a merchant in the City of London, and widow of Mr. John Pitt. She was thirty-eight and he fifty. Her jointure relieved him from pecuniary care, and her sweetness of disposition secured his domestic happiness. They set up a curious double establishment, taking a house at Upton, while retaining that at Slough. Two maidservants were kept in each, and a footman maintained the communications. So at least runs Mrs. Papendick’s gossip. Miss Burney records in her Diary a tea at Mr. De Luc’s, where Dr. Herschel accompanied a pair of vocalists “very sweetly on the violin. His newly-married wife was with him, and his sister. His wife seems good-natured; she was rich, too! And astronomers are as able as other men to discern that gold can glitter as well as stars.”
He was now at the height of prosperity and renown. Diplomas innumerable were showered upon him by Academies and learned societies. In a letter to Benjamin Franklin, he returned thanks for his election as a member of the American Philosophical Society, and acquainted him with his recent detection of a pair of attendants on the “Georgian planet.” A similar acknowledgment was addressed to the Princess Daschkoff, Directress of the Petersburg Academy of Sciences. The King of Poland sent him his portrait; the Empress Catherine II. opened negotiations for the purchase of some of his specula, Lucien Bonaparte repaired to Slough incognito; Joseph Haydn snatched a day from the turmoil of his London engagements to visit the musician-astronomer, and gaze at his monster telescopes. By universal agreement, Dr. Burney declared, Herschel was “one of the most pleasing and well-bred natural characters of the day, as well as the greatest astronomer.” They had much in common, according to Dr. Burney’s daughter. Both possessed an uncommon “suavity of disposition”; both loved music; and Dr. Burney had a “passionate inclination for astronomy.” They became friends through the medium of Dr. Burney’s versified history of that science. In September, 1797, he called at Slough with the manuscript in his valise. “The good soul was at dinner,” he relates; and, to his surprise, since he was ignorant of Herschel’s marriage, the company included several ladies, besides “a little boy.” He was, nothing loth, compelled to stay over-night; discussed with his host the plan of his work, and read to him its eighth chapter. Herschel listened with interest, and modestly owned to having learnt much from what he had heard; but presently dismayed the author by confessing his “aversion to poetry,” which he had generally regarded as “an arrangement of fine words without any adherence to the truth.” He added, however, that “when truth and science were united to those fine words,” they no longer displeased him. The readings continued at intervals, alternately at Slough and Chelsea, to the immense gratification of the copious versifier, who occasionally allowed his pleasure to overflow in his correspondence.
“Well, but Herschel has been in town,” he wrote from Chelsea College, December 10th, 1798, “for short spurts and back again, two or three times, and I have had him here two whole days. I read to him the first five books without any one objection.” And again; “He came, and his good wife accompanied him, and I read four and a-half books; and on parting, still more humble than before, or still more amiable, he thanked me for the instruction and entertainment I had given him. What say you to that? Can anything be grander?”
In spite of his “aversion,” Herschel had once, and once only, wooed the coy muse himself. The first evening paper that appeared in England, May 3rd, 1788, contained some introductory quatrains by him. An excuse for this unwonted outburst may be found in the circumstance that the sheet in which they were printed bore the name of The Star. They began with the interrogation:
“What Star art thou, about to gleam
In Novelty’s bright hemisphere?”
and continued:
“A Planet wilt thou roll sublime,