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Till Herschel's time we were content with six planets and the sun, making up the cabalistical number seven. He added another. But these four new ones entirely derange the scheme. The astronomers have not yet had opportunity to digest them into their places, and form new worlds of them. This is all unpleasant.
Indeed, they seemed to be sensible of this themselves, and they now yielded to the force of Herschel's arguments so far as to show themselves in the new character of nebulae spangled with stars; these are the stellar nebulae; quite as much as you could expect in so short a time: Rome was not built in a day: and one must have some respect to stellar feelings. He made a clean breast of it.
But is this what thou namest 'Mechanism of the Heavens, and 'System of the World; this, wherein Sirius and the Pleiades, and all Herschel's Fifteen thousand Suns per minute, being left out, some paltry handful of Moons, and inert Balls, had been looked at, nick-named, and marked in the Zodiacal Way-bill; so that we can now prate of their Whereabout; their How, their Why, their What, being hid from us, as in the signless Inane?
The variety and splendour of Herschel's labours vie with their extent. The more we study them, the more we must admire them. It is with great men, as it is with great movements in the arts, we cannot understand them without studying them under various points of view. Let us here again make a general reflection.
In one respect, too, Herschel's new planet was a much more imposing object than any one of the older bodies; it swept around the sun in a majestic orbit, far outside that of Saturn, which had previously been regarded as the boundary of the Solar System, and its stately progress required a period of not less than eighty-one years.
What marks Herschel's achievement as one of the great epochs in the history of astronomy is the fact that the detection of Uranus was the very first recorded occasion of the discovery of any planet whatever. For uncounted ages those who watched the skies had been aware of the existence of the five old planets Jupiter, Mercury, Saturn, Venus, and Mars.
The violin secured him board and lodgings along the road as he walked to London, just as Oliver Goldsmith paid his way with a similar legal tender. In London, Herschel's musical skill quickly got him an engagement at one of the theaters. In a few months we hear of his playing solos at Brabandt's aristocratic concerts.
We return to Miss Herschel's biography, in order to gather up a few particulars of her last years, and to exhibit some of the tenderer features of her character. On the occasion of her nephew's marriage, in 1829, she wrote to him in the following terms:
It has been possible here only to sketch out the chief personal points in his career, without dwelling much upon the scientific importance of his later life-long labours; but it must suffice to say briefly upon this point that Herschel's work was no mere mechanical star-finding; it was the most profoundly philosophical astronomical work ever performed, except perhaps Newton's and Laplace's.
This point settled, let it now be remarked, that Herschel's resources enabled him to unmask many of these nebulae: stars they were, and stars he forced them to own themselves. Why should any decent world wear an alias? There was nothing, you know, to be ashamed of in being an honest cluster of stars.
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