"After half an hour's vain attempt to support himself, my brother was obliged to consent to be put to bed, leaving no hope ever to see him rise again. For ten days and nights we remained in the most heart-rending situation till the 25th of August, when not one comfort was left to me but that of retiring to the chamber of death, there to ruminate without interruption on my isolated situation. Of this last solace I was robbed on the 7th of September, when the dear remains were consigned to the grave."
Faithful and devoted watcher over his dead body, to the last! When he had been buried in the little church at Upton, Windsor, at the age of eighty-four, honored by all Europe and America, Caroline could live no longer where remembrance of him made it intolerable.
She went back to Hanover, "a person," she said, sadly, "that has nothing more to do in this world," to live with her brother Dietrich. She had come to England, a girl of twenty-two; she went back an elderly woman, seventy-two. The home in Germany did not prove a happy one, but how could it without William? She lived simply, not spending half of the five hundred dollars a year left her by her dead brother.
She had already published "A Catalogue of eight hundred and sixty Stars, observed by Flamsteed, but not included in the British Catalogue," and "A General Index of Reference to every Observation of every star in the above mentioned British Catalogue." She also prepared "The Reduction and Arrangement, in the form of a Catalogue in Zones, of all the Star Clusters and Nebulæ observed by Sir William Herschel in his Sweeps," "a work," said Sir David Brewster, "of immense labor; an extraordinary monument of the unextinguished ardor of a lady of seventy-five in the cause of abstract science."
For this the Royal Astronomical Society voted her the gold medal, and gave her the unusual distinction of honorary membership.
Sixteen years after her return to Hanover, Sir John Herschel, her nephew, who had made his wonderful review of the southern heavens, discovering as many new nebulæ as his father, took his only boy, Willie, to see her.
She was now eighty-eight. The visit was overwhelming to her affectionate heart. She watched the child with the most intense delight. Fearing the results if she knew the time of their departure for England, Sir John, with mistaken kindness, went away at four o'clock in the morning, without saying good-by. But the anguish of separation was thereby rendered greater.