Herschel’s correspondence with De Morgan extended over nearly forty years, and became latterly of an intimate character. “Looking back on our long friendship,” he wrote to the widow shortly after De Morgan’s death in the spring of 1871, “I do not find a single point on which we failed to sympathise; and I recall many occasions on which his sound judgment and excellent feeling have sustained and encouraged me. Many and very distinct indications tell me that I shall not be long after him.”
It fell out as he had predicted. The obituary memoirs of the two are printed close together in the Astronomical Society’s “Monthly Notices.” After a prolonged decline of strength, Sir John Herschel died at Collingwood, in his seventy-ninth year, May 5th, 1871, his intellect remaining unclouded to the last. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, near the grave of Newton. The words engraven above his resting-place, “Coelis exploratis, hic prope Newtonum requiescit,” tell what he did, and what he deserved.
His death created an universal sense of sorrow and of loss. He left vacant a place which could never be filled. His powers, his qualities, and his opportunities made a combination impossible to be reproduced. His genius showed curious diversities from his father’s. He lacked his profound absorption, his penetrating insight, his unaccountable intuitions. A tendency to discursiveness, happily kept in check by strength of will and devotion to an elevated purpose, replaced in him his father’s enraptured concentration. On the other hand, his appreciative instinct for the recondite beauty of mathematical conceptions was wanting to his father. William Herschel possessed fine mathematical abilities; but he cultivated them no further than was necessary for the execution of his designs; and elementary geometry served his turn. But Sir John might have taken primary rank as a pure mathematician. Possibly his inventive faculty would have developed in that line more strongly than in any other. The grasp of his mind was indeed so wide that many possibilities of greatness were open to him. That he chose rightly the one to make effective, no one can doubt. The neglect on his part of astronomy would have been a scientific delinquency. His splendid patrimony of telescopic results and facilities was inalienable. It was a talent entrusted to him, which he had not the right to bury in the ground. He laboured with it instead to the last farthing. Not for his own glory. He aspired only to fill up, for the honour of his father’s name, the large measure of his achievements. In doing so he performed an unparalleled feat. He swept from pole to pole the entire surface of the hollow sphere of the sky. It is unlikely to be repeated. The days of celestial pioneering are past. Nothing on the scale of a general survey will in future be undertaken except with photographic help. The use of the direct telescopic method tends to become more and more restricted. This is a loss as well as a gain. A hortus siccus is to a blooming garden very much what a collection of photographs is to the luminous flowers of the sky. They are depicted more completely, more significantly, more conveniently for purposes of investigation, than they can be seen; but the splendour of them is gone. Their direct contemplation has an elevating effect upon the mind, which indirect study, however diligent and instructive, is incapable of producing. The sublimity of the visions drawn from the abyss of space cannot be reasoned about. It strikes home to the spectator’s inner consciousness without waiting for the approval of his understanding. Thus to Herschel, no less expressly than to the Psalmist three thousand years earlier, “the heavens told the glory of God.” He lived at his telescope a life apart, full of incommunicable experiences.
“To Herschel,” as Mr. Proctor expressed it, “astronomy was not a matter of right ascension and declination; of poising, clamping, and reading-off; of cataloguing and correcting.” “It was his peculiar privilege,” Dean Stanley remarked in his funeral sermon, “to combine with those more special studies such a width of view and such a power of expression as to make him an interpreter, a poet of science, even beyond his immediate sphere.” Hence the popularity of his books, and the favoured place he occupied in public esteem.
His character was of a more delicate fibre than his father’s. It was also, by necessary consequence, less robust. Sir William Herschel surmounted adversity. Sir John would have endured it, had his lot been so appointed. But it never came his way. He was one of those rarest of rare individuals—
“Whose even thread the Fates spin round and full,
Out of their choicest and their whitest wool.”
His life was a tissue of felicities. For him there was no weary waiting, no heart-sickening disappointment, no vicissitudes of fortune, no mental or moral tempests. Success attended each one of his efforts; he could look back without regret; he could look forward with confident hope; his family relations brought him unalloyed happiness. He suffered, indeed, one bereavement in the untimely death of his daughter, Mrs. Marshall, the wife of a nephew of Dr. Whewell; but Christian resignation sweetened his sorrow. His religion was unpretending and efficacious. No duty was left by him unfulfilled; and he wore, from youth to age, “the white flower of a blameless life.” A discriminating onlooker said of him, that his existence “was full of the serenity of the sage and the docile innocence of a child.” He was retiring almost to a fault, careless of applause, candid in accepting criticism. Although habitually indulgent, he was no flatterer, “Anyone,” Mr. Proctor said, “who objected to be set right when in error, might well be disposed to regard Sir John Herschel as a merciless correspondent, notwithstanding the calm courtesy of his remarks. He set truth in the first place, and by comparison with her, neither his own opinions, nor those of others, were permitted to have any weight whatever.” Beginners invariably met with his sympathy and encouragement. He felt for difficulties which he himself had never experienced.
Being thus constituted, he could not but inspire affection. The French physicist, Biot, when asked by Dr. Pritchard, after the death of Laplace, who, in his opinion, was his worthiest successor, replied, “If I did not love him so much, I should unhesitatingly say, John Herschel.” His own attachments were warm and constant; and the few scientific controversies in which he engaged, were carried on with his habitual gentleness and urbanity.
Herschel left eight daughters and three sons, of whom the eldest, Sir William James Herschel, succeeded him in the baronetcy, while the second, Professor Alexander Stewart Herschel, has earned celebrity by his meteoric researches. The election of the third, Colonel John Herschel, to a Fellowship of the Royal Society, in recognition of his spectroscopic examination of southern nebulæ, threw a gleam of joy over his father’s deathbed. Lady Herschel survived her husband upwards of thirteen years.