It soon became clear to her that
all her ideas and feelings had been shaped and influenced in a totally
different path. More bitter still, we are told, she came to know that in
her great sorrow and inextinguishable love she was all alone. And
bitterest of all was the feeling that, in losing her brother she had
lost the glory of her life, the source of her intellectual enjoyment.
"You don't know," she wrote to a friend, "the blank of life after
having lived within the radiance of genius." Yet to live in this
blankness, and to do the best she could with it, became the work of
Caroline Lucretia Herschel at the age of threescore years and ten,--an
age when most of us have already put off our cares and anxieties, but
when she began to enter on a new life, with new habits, new duties, and
new associations.
Her interest in astronomical pursuits never slackened, and she watched
with eagerness the labours and successes of her nephew. The respect paid
to her in society as a "woman of science" was not unwelcome, though she
affected to make light of it.
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