* * * * *

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.