Page:Memoir and correspondence of Caroline Herschel (1876).djvu/174

Miss Edgeworth's sisters, "the blank of life after having lived within the radiance of genius;" and this was the blank in which Miss Herschel doomed herself not only to live, but to try to begin anew, when past three score and ten. The extracts from her letters bear strong testimony to the gallant struggle she made to find interests and occupations in what those about her, as well as she herself, looked upon as a kind of exile, and "Why did I leave happy England?" was often her cry, more especially as time went on, and interest in her nephew and his family came mercifully to fill the heart still so yearning and ready for affection. When she heard the news of Sir John Herschel's intended departure for the Cape, she wrote, "Ja! if I was thirty or forty years junger and could go too? in Gottes nahmen!" her interest in the science to which she had devoted her best years never ceased, though she persisted to the end in ridiculing the bare suggestion that the Rosse telescope could by any possibility be so good as the, forty-foot. The homage paid to her as a savante amused as well as gratified her. "You must give me leave to send you any publication you can think of," she wrote to her nephew, "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