"My little grand-nephew making alliance with your workmen shows that he is taking after his papa. I see you now in idea, running about in petticoats among your father's carpenters, working with little tools of your own; and John Wiltshire (one of Pitt's men, whom you may perhaps remember) crying out, 'Dang the boy, if he can't drive in a nail as well as I can!'
"I thank you for the astronomical portion of your letter, and for your promise of future accounts of uncommon objects. It is not _clusters of stars_ I want you to discover in the body of the Scorpion [the astronomical sign, so called], or thereabout, for that does not answer my expectation, remembering having once heard your father, after a long, awful silence, exclaim, 'Hier ist wahrhaftig ein loch ein Himmel!' [Here, indeed, is a great gap in Heaven!], and, as I said before, stopping afterwards at the same spot, but leaving it unsatisfied."
These extracts may seem trivial to some of our readers, but they are not so, rightly considered. They illustrate the wonderful mental vivacity of their venerable writer, and in this respect are useful; but still more useful in showing how cheerfully she bore the burden of her years, and with what intellectual serenity she looked forward to her end.
We own that the lives of the Herschels are what the world would call uneventful. The discovery of a new planet, or of the orbit of a star, seems less romantic to the vulgar taste than the slaughter of ten thousand men on a field of battle. It will seem to the unthinking that the victorious general or the daring seaman, the leader of a forlorn hope, or the captain who goes down with his sinking ship, affords an example worthier of imitation than the patient, watchful, enthusiastic astronomer or his devoted sister. _His_, they will say, was a noble life. Be it so; but every life is noble which is spent in the path of duty. Do what comes to your hand to do with all honesty and completeness, and you will make _your_ life noble. Subdue your passions, master your evil thoughts, observe the laws of temperance and purity, be truthful, be firm, be honest, and keep ever before you the law of Christ as the law of your daily work, and you will make _your_ life noble. We cannot all be great commanders or daring captains, we cannot all be distinguished men of science; but we can all be righteously-living men, endeavouring to raise others by our example, and it is a higher aim to live purely than to live successfully. We cannot all command the success, just as we do not all enjoy the intellectual powers, of a Herschel; but we can emulate the industry and perseverance of the astronomer, we can copy the devoted affection and self-denial of his sister. The sorriest mistake of which men can be guilty,--yet it is a mistake which has clouded many lives,--is to suppose that duty is less imperative in its claims on the humble and unknown than on men raised or born to eminent position. Let it be understood and remembered that each one of us can rise to a standard of true heroism, by cultivating the graces of the Christian character, and doing the work which God has appointed.