Faint murmurs from the meadows come,
Like hints and echoes of the world
To spirits folded in the womb."
But we regain the old familiar places, and, alas! we find that change has been as busy with them as with us. The signs of decay are upon the trees; the brook has ceased to flow; the rose-bush has withered to the ground. There are trees as green and streams as musical and flowers as sweet as in our youth; but they are not the streams or flowers or trees which delighted us, and to us they can never be as dear. But a worse alteration has taken place than any visible in the face of nature. We discover that we have lost the old habits, the old capacity of enjoyment; and we soon discover that it was the sympathies, the hopes, the aspirations of youth which, after all, lent to these early scenes their rare and irrecoverable attraction.
And thus it was that Miss Herschel found everything changed. A life of fifty years spent in a certain routine and upon certain objects, had unfitted her to tread in the old paths. It soon became clear to her that all her ideas and feelings had been shaped and influenced in a totally different path. More bitter still, we are told, she came to know that in her great sorrow and inextinguishable love she was all alone. And bitterest of all was the feeling that, in losing her brother she had lost the glory of her life, the source of her intellectual enjoyment. "You don't know," she wrote to a friend, "the blank of life after having lived within the radiance of genius." Yet to live in this blankness, and to do the best she could with it, became the work of Caroline Lucretia Herschel at the age of threescore years and ten,—an age when most of us have already put off our cares and anxieties, but when she began to enter on a new life, with new habits, new duties, and new associations.
Her interest in astronomical pursuits never slackened, and she watched with eagerness the labours and successes of her nephew. The respect paid to her in society as a "woman of science" was not unwelcome, though she affected to make light of it. "You must give me leave," she wrote to Sir John, "to send you any publications you can think of, without mentioning anything about paying for them. For it is necessary I should every now and then lay out a little of my spare cash in that, for the sake of supporting the reputation of being a learned lady; (there is for you!) for I am not only looked at for such a one, but even stared at here in Hanover!" It was with unaffected modesty she deprecated the honorary membership of the Irish Academy, conferred on one who, she said, had not for many years discovered even a comet; yet she was by no means insensible to the distinction. Every man of scientific eminence who visited Hanover visited this aged lady; and her presence in the theatre, even in her latest years, was a constant source of attraction. Such was the simple frugality of her habits, that she experienced an actual difficulty in disposing of her income. She affirmed that the largest sum she could spend upon herself was £50 a year; and the annual pension of £100, left by her brother, she refused, or else devoted the quarterly or half-yearly payment to the purchase of some handsome present for her nephew or niece.
Such was Caroline Lucretia Herschel; and as such she was a remarkable proof that the rarest womanly gifts of affectionate forethought and loving devotion may exist in combination with intellectual strength and scientific enthusiasm.
Of the force, keenness, and permanency of her sisterly love, an illustration of a pathetic character occurs in a letter which she addressed to her nephew, February 27, 1823:—
"I am grown much thinner than I was six months ago: when I look at my hands, they put me so in mind of what your dear father's were, when I saw them tremble under my eyes, as we latterly played at backgammon together."