"Herschel, you know, and everybody knows, is one of the most pleasing and well-bred natural characters of the present age," says Dr. Burney, who had opportunity to know.
The portrait which is given in the frontispiece must have been painted about this time (1788), and the eager, ardent face shows his inner life far better than any words can do.
Even in his scientific writings, which everything conspired to render grave and sober, the almost poetic nature of his mind shows forth. In one of his (unpublished) note-books, now in the Royal Society's library, I found this entry:
"640th Sweep—November 28, 1786.—The nebula of Orion, which I saw by the front view, was so glaring and beautiful that I could not think of taking any place of its extent."
He was quite alone under the perfectly silent sky when this was written, and he was at his post simply to make this and other such observations. But the sky was beautiful to him, and his faithful sister, Carolina, sitting below, has preserved for us the words as they dropped from his lips.
On the 11th of January, 1787, Herschel discovered two satellites to Uranus.
After he had well assured himself of their existence, but before he communicated his discovery to the world, he made this crucial test. He prepared a sketch of Uranus attended by his two satellites, as it would appear on the night of February 10, 1787, and when the night came, "the heavens displayed the original of my drawings, by showing in the situation I had delineated them the Georgian planet attended by two satellites. I confess that this scene appeared to me with additional beauty, as the little secondary planets seemed to give a dignity to the primary one which raises it into a more conspicuous situation among the great bodies of the solar system.". . .
In a memoir of 1789, he has a few sentences which show the living way in which the heavens appeared to him:
"This method of viewing the heavens seems to throw them into a new kind of light. "They are now seen to resemble a luxuriant garden, which contains the greatest variety of productions in different flourishing beds; and one advantage we may at least reap from it is, that we can, as it were, extend the range of our experience to an immense duration. For is it not almost the same thing whether we live successively to witness the germination, blooming, foliage, fecundity, fading, withering, and corruption of a plant, or whether a vast number of [Pg 85] specimens selected from every stage through which the plant passes in the course of its existence be brought at once to our view?"
The thought here is no less finely expressed than it is profound. The simile is perfect, if we have the power to separate among the vast variety each state of being from every other, and if the very luxuriance of illustration in the heavens does not bewilder and overpower the mind. It was precisely this discriminating power that Herschel possessed in perfection.