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As a postscript to Haydn's story we may tag on here a concise statement in his note-book, of the domestic affairs of one whom we do not think of now as a musician. "On June 15th, I went from Windsor to Slough to Doctor Herschel, where I saw the great telescope. It is forty feet long and five feet in diameter. The machinery is vast, but so ingenious that a single man can put it in motion with ease.
This room was about ten feet long, extending from the middle of the ship to the side, and about six feet wide. A telescope was the first thing which attracted his attention. It lay in a rack near the doorway. He took it down, but it fell apart at once, being completely corroded. In the middle of the room there was a compass, which hung from the ceiling.
Included in the gear were telescope and binoculars; these we put to our eyes only to realize with surprise that we were located in the center of a hollow bowl perhaps a hundred and fifty or two hundred feet across and that an horizon of upsurging vegetation cut off our view of anything except the sky itself.
Stars of all magnitudes he found to have the same appearance; those of the fifth and sixth magnitude having the same character, when seen through a telescope, as Sirius, the largest of the stars, when seen by the naked eye.
A cluster of stars viewed in a small telescope will often seem like a nebula, for the rays of the stars become blended. A powerful telescope will, however, dispel the illusion and reveal the separate stars. It was, therefore, thought that all the nebulæ might be merely clusters so exceedingly remote that our mightiest instruments failed to resolve them into stars.
Herschel found that in England, there are not above a hundred hours in a year during which the heavens can be advantageously observed with a telescope of forty feet, furnished with a magnifying power of a thousand.
I said then that on the previous afternoon something had happened. It was something which I might have foreseen, which, in fact, with my habit of putting the telescope to my blind eye, I obstinately had refused to foresee. During our wanderings I had watched the flowering of her splendid beauty as she drank in health from the glow of her own Orient.
Here the work of English instrumental artists was for the first time rivalled, and that of English opticians when Fraunhofer entered the new establishment far surpassed. The development given to the refracting telescope by this extraordinary man was indispensable to the progress of that fundamental part of astronomy which consists in the exact determination of the places of the heavenly bodies.
He consoled himself, however, by following a ship which was sailing some knots ahead in the same direction, and whose movements he observed closely through the telescope. Suddenly he sprang up in great alarm, and gave a vehement order to change our course.
We conjectured an armistice. Through a telescope we could see little black specks on the centre of the hill; they appeared to be building sangars. The Naval Cone Redoubt, having the best telescope, report that the walls are facing this way. In that case the black specks were probably British, and yet not even in the morning sun did we get a word of certainty. We hardly know what to think.
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