my income is by one third more than I have the power to spend, for by a twelve years' trial I find that I cannot get rid of more than 600 thl. = £100 per year, without making myself ridiculous."
Her thoughts were not set on money, or on the respect which money, honourably earned, usually brings. The memory of the "best and dearest of brothers" clung to her with an all-absorbing power. It was her first and her last love. "You have made me completely happy for some time," she wrote from Hanover to his son, "with the account you sent me of the double stars; but it vexes me more and more that in this abominable city there is no one who is capable of partaking in the joy I feel on this revival of your father's name. His observations on double stars were from first to last the most interesting subject; he never lost sight of it in his papers on the construction of the heavens, etc. And I cannot help lamenting that he could not take to his grave with him the satisfaction I feel at present in seeing his son doing him so ample justice by endeavouring to perfect what he could only begin." When Sir John Herschel delivered the address that preceded the handing over to Bessel of the Astronomical Society's Gold Medal for determining, by means of the heliometer, the distance from us of the double star 61 Cygni, she was heart and soul with him when he said, "Gentlemen, I congratulate you and myself that we have lived to see the great and hitherto impassable barrier to our excursions into the sidereal universe—that barrier against which we have chafed so long and so vainly—almost simultaneously overleaped at three different points"[1] He
- ↑ Astron. Soc. Trans. xii. 448–53.
