She followed, however, with intense delight the progress of her nephew’s career, in which she beheld the continuation of his father’s. The intelligence of his having opened a nebular campaign in 1825, was like the sound of the trumpet to a disabled war-horse. Nothing but the decline of her powers, she assured him, would have prevented her “coming by the first steamboat to offer you the same assistance as, by your father’s instructions, I was enabled to afford him.” And again, in 1831: “You have made me completely happy with the account you sent me of the double stars; but it vexes me more and more that in this abominable city there is no one who is capable of partaking in the joy I feel on this revival of your father’s name. His observations on double stars were, from first to last, the most interesting subject; he never lost sight of it. And I cannot help lamenting that he could not take to his grave the satisfaction I feel at seeing his son doing him such ample justice by endeavouring to perfect what he could only begin.”
Sir John’s trip to the Cape roused her ardent sympathy. “Ja!” she exclaimed, on hearing of the project, “If I were thirty or forty years younger, and could go too. In Gottes Namen!” But she was eighty-two, and could only give vent to her feelings by “jingling glasses with Betty” after dinner on his birthday, while mistress and maid together cried, “Es lebe Sir John! Hoch! Hurrah!” The reports of his achievements in the southern hemisphere were, she said, “like a drop of oil supplying my expiring lamp.” “At first, on reading them,” she wrote to Lady Herschel, “I could turn wild; but this is only a flash; for soon I fall into a reverie on what my dear nephew’s father would have felt if such letters could have been directed to him, and cannot suppress my wish that his life instead of mine had been spared until this present moment.”
The joyful intelligence of her nephew’s safe return to England was sent to Miss Herschel by the Duke of Cambridge, whose attentions to her were unfailing; and she lived to hold in her hands the volume of “Cape Results,” by which her brother’s great survey of the heavens was rounded off to completion. But by that time the lassitude of approaching death was upon her.
Three visits from her nephew broke the monotony of separation. In October, 1824, he stopped at Hanover on his way homeward from the Continent. Before his arrival, her “arms were longing to receive him”; after his departure, she “followed him in idea every inch he moved farther” away from her. Six years passed, and then he came again.
“I found my aunt,” he reported, June 19th, 1832, “wonderfully well, and very nicely and comfortably lodged, and we have since been on the full trot. She runs about the town with me, and skips up her two flights of stairs as light and fresh at least as some folks I could name who are not a fourth part of her age. In the morning till eleven or twelve she is dull and weary; but as the day advances she gains life, and is quite ‘fresh and funny’ at ten or eleven p.m., and sings old rhymes, nay, even dances! to the great delight of all who see her.”
Their final meeting was in 1838, when Sir John’s Cape laurels were just gathered; and he brought with him his eldest son, aged six. But the old lady was terrified lest the child should come to harm; his food, his sleep, his scramblings, his playthings, were all subjects of the deepest anxiety. Then Sir John, desiring to spare her “the sadness of farewell,” perpetrated a moonlight flitting, which left her dismayed and desolate at the abrupt termination of the visit, and smarting with the intolerable consciousness of opportunities lost for saying what could now never be said. “All that passed,” she said, “was like Sheridan’s Chapter of Accidents.” It was too much for her; she did not desire the repetition of a pleasure rated at a price higher than she could afford to pay. “I would not wish on any account,” she told Lady Herschel in 1842, “to see either my nephew or you, my dear niece, again in this world, for I could not endure the pain of parting once more; but I trust I shall find and know you in the next.”
She lived habitually in the past, and found the present—as Mrs. Knipping, Dietrich’s daughter said—“not only strange, but annoying.” Sometimes she would rouse herself from a “melancholy lethargy” to spend a few moments “in looking over my store of astronomical and other memorandums of upwards of fifty years’ collecting, and destroying all that might produce nonsense when coming through the hands of a Block-kopf into the Zeitungen.” Again she would dip back into the career of the “forty-foot,” or recall the choral performance to which the tube had resounded not far from sixty years before, “when I was one of the nimblest and foremost to get in and out of it. But now—lack-a-day—I can hardly cross the room without help. But what of that? Dorcas, in the Beggars’ Opera, says:
“‘One cannot eat one’s cake and have it too!’”
That venerable instrument marked for her the ne plus ultra of optical achievement. She would not admit the sacrilegious thought of its being outdone. “I believe I have water on my brains,” she informed her nephew in August, 1842, “and all my bones ache so that I can hardly crawl; and, besides, sometimes a whole week passes without anybody coming near me, till they stumble on a paragraph in the newspaper about Gruithuisen’s discoveries, or Lord Queenstown’s great telescope, which shall beat Sir William Herschel’s all to nothing; and such a visit sometimes makes me merry for a whole day.”
From time to time she wrote books of “Recollections,” which she forwarded, with anxious care, to England. They contain nearly all that is intimately known of Sir William Herschel’s life. The entries in her “Day-book” ceased finally only on September 3rd, 1845. In the hope of giving permanent form to the memories that haunted her, she began, at ninety-two, “a piece of work which I despair of finishing before my eyesight and life leave me in the lurch. You will, perhaps, wonder what such a thing can be as I may pretend to do; but I cannot help it, and shall not rest till I have wrote the history of the Herschels.” “You remember,” she added, “you take the work in whatever state I may leave it, and make the best of it at your leisure.” It remained a piquant fragment. The fervour of her start was soon quenched by physical collapse, and she acknowledged her powerlessness “to do anything beside keeping herself alive.” Her last letter to Collingwood was finished with difficulty, December 3rd, 1846. Monthly reports of her state, however, continued to be sent thither by Miss Beckedorff, who, with Mrs. Knipping, cared for her to the last.