e could not conclude our notice of this remarkable family without some further allusion to its not least remarkable member—Caroline Lucretia Herschel.
To her varied accomplishments, her astronomical researches, and, above all, to her unwearied and unselfish devotion to her brother William, we have already made frequent allusion. She seemed to live for him and in him, to live for his fame and prosperity; and she poured out at his feet the treasures of an inexhaustible affection. To assist him in his labours, at whatever sacrifice, was her sole object in life; and she was certainly more careful for his reputation than was he himself. During his declining years she was his principal stay and support, and she was in daily attendance to note down or to calculate the results of his observations. His death was a severe blow to her; but, with characteristic courage, she retired to Hanover, gave herself up to scientific pursuits, and in comparative solitude spent her later years.
Her biographer writes:—
"When all was over, her only desire seems to have been to hurry away. Hardly was her brother laid in his grave than she collected the few things she cared to keep, and left for ever the country where she had spent fifty years of her life, living and toiling for him and him only. 'If I should leave off making memorandums of such events as affect or are interesting to me, I should feel like what I am,—namely, a person that has nothing more to do in this world.' Mournful words! doubly mournful, when we know that the writer had nearly half an ordinary lifetime still between her and that grave which she made haste to prepare, in the hope that her course was nearly run. Who can think of her, at the age of seventy-two, heart-broken and desolate, going back to the home of her youth in the fond expectation of finding consolation, without a pang of sympathetic pity? She found everything changed."
That, indeed, is to all of us the greatest grief, when we return to the home of our youth. It is as if, during the years of our absence, we had expected everything to stand as still as in the palace of the Sleeping Beauty while the charm rested upon it. We are fain to see the trees in their young greenness as when they sheltered our childhood, to find the hedgerows blooming with the same violets, to hear the mill-stream murmuring with the same music. Time furrows our brows with wrinkles, and streaks our hair with silver; our hearts grow colder; our minds lose their elasticity and freshness; our friends pass away from our side. But still we think to ourselves that in the old scenes all things are as they were. We say to ourselves: The bird sings as of old in the elm-trees at the garden-foot; the rose-bush blossoms as of old against our favourite window.
"The varying year with blade and sheaf
Clothes and re-clothes the happy plains;
Here rests the sap within the leaf,
Here stays the blood along the veins.
Faint shadows, vapours lightly curled,