Part 12

And this great ambition nerved him for action, continued and laborious, as long as he lived. He was never satisfied; always achieving. Little can be expected from those who are easily satisfied.

George III. wisely appointed Herschel Royal Astronomer, though with the too small salary of one thousand dollars yearly. He came back to Bath only to perform the last musical duty on Whit Sunday, 1782, the anthem for the day being his own composition, and to say good-by to his pupils.

He moved to Datchet in 1782, and set up his twenty-foot telescope. In 1783 he had made three reviews of the heavens. In 1784 he made a fourth review with his twenty-foot telescope. Caroline says: "My brother began his sweeps when the instrument was yet in a very unfinished state, and my feelings were not very comfortable when every moment I was alarmed by a crash or a fall, knowing him to be elevated fifteen feet or more on a temporary crossbeam, instead of a safe gallery. The ladders had not even their braces at the bottom; and one night, in a very high wind, he had hardly touched the ground before the whole apparatus came down.... I could give a pretty long list of accidents which were near proving fatal to my brother as well as myself."

A gentleman who visited him at Datchet wrote: "The thermometer in the garden stood at 13 deg. Fahrenheit; but in spite of this, Herschel observes the whole night through, except that he stops every three or four hours and goes in the room for a few moments. For some years Herschel has observed the heavens every hour when the weather is clear, and this always in the open air, because he says that the telescope only performs well when it is at the same temperature as the air. He protects himself against the weather by putting on more clothing. He has an excellent constitution, and thinks about nothing else in the world but the celestial bodies."

But, occupied as Herschel was about "celestial bodies," he yet found time to think about earthly things, for we find him at forty-five, May 8, 1783, marrying Mary, the wealthy widow of John Pitt, Esq., a lady of much intelligence and amiability.

The sad feature of the new relationship was the misery it brought to Caroline. Her whole life had centred in William. For eleven years she had devoted every moment, every wish, every thought to him. She had watched all night among the stars with him, month after month, and year after year, in cold and in heat, and superintended his home by day. His every desire was her law. She loved no other, and he was her all. Perhaps she ought to have known that another might come into his life, but she trusted blindly, and did not question the future.

When the wife came into the home, Caroline went out of it forever. For more than twenty years she lived in lodgings, always "cheerless and solitary," her only happiness found in coming day by day to help her brother in his great work. Sometimes, when the wife was absent, Caroline came back for a few days and lived over the old unalloyed life, and then went back to her lonely lodgings.

For ten years following this marriage, she probably told her heart-aches in her journal; but before her death she destroyed the record of these years, that the feelings of those who were alive might not be pained. In later days she became more reconciled to Lady Herschel, as "a dear sister, for as such I now know you," and idolized their only son, the renowned Sir John Herschel, born nine years after their marriage.

In 1785, Herschel began to construct his great forty-foot telescope, and the next year removed to Slough, not far from Windsor. "In the whole of the apparatus," he said, "none but common workmen were employed, for I made drawings of every part of it, by which it was easy to execute the work, as I constantly inspected and directed every person's labor; though sometimes there were not less than forty different workmen employed at the same time. While the stand of the telescope was preparing, I also began the construction of the great mirror, of which I inspected the casting, grinding, and polishing; and the work was in this manner carried on with no other interruption than that occasioned by the removal of all the apparatus and materials from where I then lived, to my present situation at Slough." He had his first view through the telescope February 19, 1787. George III. gave twenty thousand dollars for the building of this instrument, and one thousand dollars yearly for its maintenance.

A half-century afterwards, the woodwork having become decayed, it was taken down, the great tube laid horizontally, and, after Sir John Herschel and his family had passed through it, a poem written by Sir John having been read, it was sealed January 1, 1840, and placed on piers.

With this great telescope, Herschel discovered two satellites of Saturn, Mimas and Enceladus; one on August 27, 1789, and the other on September 17 of the same year. Two years before this, January 11, 1787, he discovered two satellites of Uranus, Oberon and Titania. Sixty years afterwards, Mr. Lassell, of England, discovered the remaining two satellites of Uranus, called Ariel and Umbriel.

From this time his work went forward grandly. He had already completed more than two hundred seven-foot, one hundred and fifty ten-foot, and eighty twenty-foot mirrors. For many of the telescopes sent abroad he made no stands, but provided the drawings. He wrote much about Saturn and its rings, and showed that its most distant satellite, Japetus, turns once on its axis in each revolution about its primary, as our moon does about the earth.

He studied carefully the nature of the sun, its probable gaseous surface, and its spots, and was the first to suspect their periodic character. What would Herschel have said to the wonderful photographic representations of these spots given by Professor Langley, in his New Astronomy; spots which are one billion square miles in size; more than five times the surface of the land and water on the earth? He saw, as astronomers to-day see, that heat cannot be produced without expenditure of force; and that the sun is probably cooling, even though scarcely perceptibly for ages to come. He saw what science now generally concedes, the rise and fall of the solar system; its gradual fitness for the coming of man, through almost countless centuries; and its final unfitness, when his generations shall have gone forever.

He wrote much about the Milky Way, believing at first that it could be completely resolved into stars, about eighteen millions of them; but later he changed his theory, having found so much nebulous matter--in a state of condensation as though new worlds were forming, possibly to be the homes of some new race, or of man in the ages to come.

His study of the variable stars attracted wide attention. He found that the star Mira Ceti was for several months invisible to the naked eye; then it grew brighter and brighter, and finally disappeared for months, as before. He saw that other stars are periodic, and came to the conclusion that this is occasioned by the rotation of the star upon its axis, by which different parts of its surface are presented to us periodically.

He made a catalogue of double stars, and found by laborious calculations that such stars have a common centre of gravity; that one sun revolves about another. He found that our solar system has a motion of its own; a grand orbit round some as yet unknown centre, and that other systems have a like motion.

What this centre may be, whether a great sun like Sirius, one hundred times larger than ours, with unknown powers and unknown uses, is of course only conjecture.

Herschel gave much attention to nebulae, discovering and describing twenty-five hundred new nebulae and clusters. He gave his life to the study of the construction of the heavens. Concerning his statement of the general construction, Professor Holden, himself a brilliant astronomer, says: "It is the groundwork upon which we have still to build.... As a scientific conception it is perhaps the grandest that has ever entered into the human mind. As a study of the height to which the efforts of one man may go, it is almost without a parallel.... As a practical astronomer he remains without an equal. In profound philosophy he has few superiors. By a kindly chance he can be claimed as the citizen of no one country. In very truth his is one of the few names which belong to the whole world."

The distinguished man, though unassuming and gentle in manner, must have had a realizing sense of the greatness of his work, for he said, "I have looked further into space than ever human being did before me. I have observed stars of which the light takes two millions of years to travel to this globe."

He gave much study to light and heat. So boundless was his knowledge believed to be, that a farmer called one day to ask the proper time for cutting his grass.

"Look at that field," said the scientist, "and when I tell you it is mine, I think you will not need another proof to convince you that I am no more weatherwise than yourself or the rest of my neighbors."

He worked earnestly till he was seventy-six, always depending upon his faithful and inseparable Caroline for aid in his labors. He made a telescope for her, with which she swept the heavens for comets, finding eight, five of which she discovered for the first time.

At seventy-six his health began to fail. He had worked incessantly from his struggling boyhood, but brain work does not wear us out; care and anxiety bring the marks of age upon us. He now took little journeys away from Slough for change of scene and air, while Caroline stayed at home to copy his papers for the Royal Society, and to arrange his manuscripts. In 1816, he was made a knight of the Royal Hanoverian Guelphic Order, by the Prince Regent, and in 1821 was the first president of the Royal Astronomical Society, his son being its first foreign secretary.

In February, 1818, Caroline spent twelve precious days with her brother, "not in idleness," she says, "but in sorrow and sadness. He is not only unwell, but low in spirits." Later he went to Bath with Lady Herschel. "The last moments before he stepped into the carriage," says the loving Caroline, "were spent in walking with me through his library and workrooms, pointing with anxious looks to every shelf and drawer, desiring me to examine all and to make memorandums of them as well as I could. He was hardly able to support himself, and his spirits were so low, that I found difficulty in commanding my voice so far as to give him the assurance he should find on his return that my time had not been misspent.

"When I was left alone I found that I had no easy task to perform, for there were packets of writings to be examined which had not been looked at for the last forty years. But I did not pass a single day without working in the library as long as I could read a letter without candle-light, and taking with me papers to copy, etc., which employed me for the best part of the night, and thus I was enabled to give my brother a clear account of what had been done at his return."

On the 4th of July, 1819, Herschel sent a note to his dear co-worker. "Lina,--There is a great comet. I want you to assist me. Come to dine and spend the day here. If you can come soon after one o'clock we shall have time to prepare maps and telescopes. I saw its situation last night,--it has a long tail."

Caroline wrote on this small slip of yellow paper: "I keep this as a relic! Every line now traced by the hand of my dear brother becomes a treasure to me."

Every day hereafter she spent the forenoon with Sir William. On the 15th of August she went as usual and found that he was confined to his room. "I flew there immediately," she says. "As soon as he saw me, I was sent to the library to fetch one of his last papers and a plate of the forty-foot telescope. But for the universe I could not have looked twice at what I had snatched from the shelf, and when he faintly asked if the breaking up of the Milky Way was in it, I said 'Yes!' and he looked content. I cannot help remembering this circumstance, it was the last time I was sent to the library on such an occasion. That the anxious care for his papers and workroom never ended but with his life was proved by his frequent whispered inquiries if they were locked and the key safe, of which I took care to assure him that they were, and the key in Lady Herschel's hands.