bitterness. But among the purest and freest from vice of all the harvests reaped from the seedbed then tilled and sown, was that of William Herschel in his laborious study of the stars. It left no bitter weed behind it to poison or deface the riches of its harvest.
Herschel was prospering in worldly circumstances amid this stress of effort and thought. He had learned also what a great poet expressed in words some years after: "The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in relation with beauty and truth."[1] His intensity required more room for its exercise. He was realising, he was putting into practical form Laplace's idea of a philosopher as one "who, uniting to a fertile imagination a rigid severity in investigation and observation, is at once tormented by the desire of ascertaining the cause of the phenomena, and by the fear of deceiving himself in that which he assigns."[2] Accordingly, he first "moved to a larger house, which had a garden behind it, and open space down to the river." It should be a place of pilgrimage to astronomers, for there discoveries were made, and also what were thought to be famous discoveries, but were not, and there the mirror for a great telescope was finished. Alone, without encouragement from the outside world of science, plunged in the depths of triflers' gay idleness, and sometimes subjected to the sharp tongue of his sister Caroline, this unwearied worker toiled on to his goal. He was determined to see what others had not seen, to know what others had not discovered. And he succeeded in reaching that goal.
