and desolate, going back to the home of her youth in the fond expectation of finding consolation, without a pang of sympathetic pity?  She found everything changed.”

That, indeed, is to all of us the greatest grief, when we return to the home of our youth.  It is as if, during the years of our absence, we had expected everything to stand as still as in the palace of the Sleeping Beauty while the charm rested upon it.  We are fain to see the trees in their young greenness as when they sheltered our childhood, to find the hedgerows blooming with the same violets, to hear the mill-stream murmuring with the same music.  Time furrows our brows with wrinkles, and streaks our hair with silver; our hearts grow colder; our minds lose their elasticity and freshness; our friends pass away from our side.  But still we think to ourselves that in the old scenes all things are as they were.  We say to ourselves:  The bird sings as of old in the elm-trees at the garden-foot; the rose-bush blossoms as of old against our favourite window.

    “The varying year with blade and sheaf
      Clothes and re-clothes the happy plains;
    Here rests the sap within the leaf,
      Here stays the blood along the veins. 
    Faint shadows, vapours lightly curled,
      Faint murmurs from the meadows come,
    Like hints and echoes of the world
      To spirits folded in the womb.”

* * * * *

But we regain the old familiar places, and, alas! we find that change has been as busy with them as with us.  The signs of decay are upon the trees; the brook has ceased to flow; the rose-bush has withered to the ground.  There are trees as green and streams as musical and flowers as sweet as in our youth; but they are not the streams or flowers or trees which delighted us, and to us they can never be as dear.  But a worse alteration has taken place than any visible in the face of nature.  We discover that we have lost the old habits, the old capacity of enjoyment; and we soon discover that it was the sympathies, the hopes, the aspirations of youth which, after all, lent to these early scenes their rare and irrecoverable attraction.

And thus it was that Miss Herschel found everything changed.  A life of fifty years spent in a certain routine and upon certain objects, had unfitted her to tread in the old paths.  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.