In honour of her ninety-sixth birthday, the King of Prussia sent her, through Humboldt’s friendly hands, the Gold Medal of Science; and on the following anniversary, March 16th, 1847, she entertained the Crown Prince and Princess for two hours. Not only with conversation; she sang to them, too, a composition of Sir William’s, “Suppose we sing a Catch.” She had a new gown and smart cap for the occasion; and seemed “more revived than exhausted” by her efforts. Her last message to her nephew and his family—sent March 31st—was to say, with her “best love” “that she often wished to be with them, often felt alone, did not quite like old age with its weaknesses and infirmities, but that she, too, sometimes laughed at the world, liked her meals, and was satisfied with Betty’s services.”
On the 9th of January, 1848, she tranquilly breathed her last, and “the unquiet heart was at rest.” She was buried beside her parents in the churchyard of the Gartengemeinde, at Hanover, with an epitaph of her own composition.[F] It records that the eyes closed in death had in life been turned towards the “starry heavens,” as her discoveries of comets, and her participation in her brother’s “immortal labours,” bear witness to future ages. By her special request a lock of “her revered brother’s” hair, and an old almanac used by her father, were placed in her coffin, which was escorted to the grave by royal carriages, and covered with wreaths of laurel and cypress from the royal gardens at Herrenhausen.
[F] “Der Blick der Verklärten war hienieden dem gestirnten Himmel zugewandt; die eigenen Cometen-Entdeckungen, und die Theilnahme an den unsterblichen Arbeiten ihres Bruders, Wilhelm Herschel, zeugen davon bis in die späteste Nachwelt.”
Caroline Herschel was not a woman of genius. Her mind was sound and vigorous, rather than brilliant. No abstract enthusiasm inspired her; no line of inquiry attracted her; she seems to have remained ignorant even of the subsequent history of her own comets. She prized them as trophies, but not unduly. The assignment of property in comets reminded her, she humorously remarked, when in her ninety-third year, of the children’s game, “He who first cries ‘Kick!’ shall have the apple.” Yet her faculties were of no common order, and they were rendered serviceable by moral strength and absolute devotedness. Her persistence was indomitable, her zeal was tempered by good sense; her endurance, courage, docility, and self-forgetfulness went to the limits of what is possible to human nature. With her readiness of hand and eye, her precision, her rapidity, her prompt obedience to a word or glance, she realised the ideal of what an assistant should be.
Herself and her performances she held in small esteem. Compliments and honours had no inflating effect upon her. Indeed, she deprecated them, lest they should tend to diminish her brother’s glory. “Saying too much of what I have done,” she wrote in 1826, “is saying too little of him, for he did all. I was a mere tool which he had the trouble of sharpening and adapting for the purpose he wanted it, for lack of a better. A little praise is very comforting, and I feel confident of having deserved it for my patience and perseverance, but none for great abilities or knowledge.” Again: “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.” And her entire and touching humility appears concentrated in the following sentence from a letter to her nephew: “My only reason for saying so much of myself is to show with what miserable assistance your father made shift to obtain the means of exploring the heavens.”
The aim in life of this admirable woman was not to become learned or famous, but to make herself useful. Her function was, in her own unvarying opinion, a strictly secondary one. She had no ambition. Distinctions came to her unsought and incidentally. She was accordingly content with the slight and fragmentary supply of knowledge sufficing for the accurate performance of her daily tasks. No inner craving tormented her into amplifying it. The following of any such impulse would probably have impaired, rather than improved, her efficiency. The turn of her mind was, above all things, practical. She used formulæ as other women use pins, needles and scissors, for certain definite purposes, but with complete indifference as to the mode of their manufacture. What was required of her, however, she accomplished superlatively well, and this was the summit of her desires. She shines, and will continue to shine, by the reflected light that she loved.
CHAPTER VII.
SIR JOHN HERSCHEL AT CAMBRIDGE AND SLOUGH.
“The little boy is entertaining, comical, and promising,” Dr. Burney wrote after his visit to Slough in 1797. John Frederick William Herschel was then five years old, having been born “within the shadow of the great telescope” March 7, 1792. He was an industrious little fellow, especially in doing mischief. “When one day I was sitting beside him,” his aunt relates, “listening to his prattle, my attention was drawn by his hammering to see what he might be about, and I found that it was the continuation of many days’ labour, and that the ground about the corner of the house was undermined, the corner-stone entirely away, and he was hard at work going on with the next. I gave the alarm, and old John Wiltshire, a favourite carpenter, came running, crying out, ‘God bless the boy, if he is not going to pull the house down!’” And she wrote to him at Feldhausen; “I see you now in idea, running about in petticoats among your father’s carpenters, working with little tools of your own, and John Wiltshire crying out, ‘Dang the boy, if he can’t drive in a nail as well as I can!’”
