" He and the workmen were
instantly with her; but they did not free her from the torturing
position without leaving nearly two ounces of her flesh behind, and it
was long before she was able to take her place again at the instrument.
It would be interesting, if it were but practicable, to give a brief
journal of her life during the fifty years she lived in England, from
the time of her arrival in Bath, August 28, 1772, till the time of her
brother's death, August 25, 1822, after which she returned to Hanover.
We have given enough, perhaps, to suggest the mode and the activity of
her life; but of her brother's marriage, and the trial it brought upon
her in giving up the supreme place she had held in his love and
companionship for sixteen years; of the details of her discoveries, and
the interesting correspondence which accompanied them; of her various
great and noble friends, and her relations with them; of the death of
her brother, then Sir William Herschel, and the terrible blow it proved
to her; of her return to Holland, to the home of another brother; of her
sorrow and disappointment at the changes which had taken place in the
home of her youth during the long years which had brought her to old
age--she was then seventy-two--and to face "the blank of life after
having lived within the radiance of genius;" of the comfort she derived
from the members of her brother's family whom she had left behind in
"happy England;" of the honors which the chief scientific men in the
kingdom bestowed upon her--of all these matters we can do no more than
to simply touch upon them as above, although, if we might refer to them
at greater length, it would be but to increase our admiration and esteem
for one of the strongest, most serviceable, and most faithful women that
ever lived.
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