His death was a severe blow to her; but, with
characteristic courage, she retired to Hanover, gave herself up to
scientific pursuits, and in comparative solitude spent her later years.
Her biographer writes:--
"When all was over, her only desire seems to have been to hurry
away. Hardly was her brother laid in his grave than she
collected the few things she cared to keep, and left for ever
the country where she had spent fifty years of her life, living
and toiling for him and him only. 'If I should leave off making
memorandums of such events as affect or are interesting to me,
I should feel like what I am,--namely, a person that has
nothing more to do in this world.' Mournful words! doubly
mournful, when we know that the writer had nearly half an
ordinary lifetime still between her and that grave which she
made haste to prepare, in the hope that her course was nearly
run. Who can think of her, at the age of seventy-two,
heart-broken and desolate, going back to the home of her youth
in the fond expectation of finding consolation, without a pang
of sympathetic pity? She found everything changed.
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