[Footnote 1:  Professor Mozley, “University Sermons,” pp. 145, 146.]

Now, this is the feeling which the study of Astronomy very certainly awakens.  Every day the astronomer discovers something which quickens his curiosity to discover more.  Every day he catches new glimpses of the Almighty Wisdom, which stimulate his desire for a further revelation.  And all he learns, and all he anticipates learning, combine to produce in him an emotion of awe.  What grandeur lies before him in that endless procession of worlds—­in that array of suns and stars extending beyond the limits of the most powerful telescopic vision!  How marvellous it is!  How beautiful!  Observe the combination of simplicity with power; note how a great principle of “law” underlies the apparent intricacy of eccentric and intersecting orbits.  And then the field of inquiry is inexhaustible.  The astronomer has no fear of feeling the satiety of an Alexander, when he lamented that he had no more worlds to conquer.  What Newton said of himself is true of every astronomer,—­he is but as a child on the sea-shore, picking up a shell here and a shell there, but unable to grasp a full conception of the mighty ocean that thunders in his ears!

And, therefore, because Astronomy cherishes the feelings of awe and reverence and praise, because it inspires a continual yearning after additional knowledge, because it reveals to us something of the character of God, we conceive that of all the sciences it affords the purest intellectual gratification.  Certainly it is one of the most absorbing.  Its attraction seems to be irresistible.  Once an astronomer, always an astronomer; the stars, we may fancy, will not relax the spell they lay upon their votary.  He willingly withdraws himself from the din and gaiety of social life, to shut himself up in his chamber, and, with the magic tube due to the genius of a Galileo, survey with ever-new delight the celestial wonders.  So was it with Tycho Brahe, and Copernicus, and Kepler; so was it, as the following pages will show, with that remarkable family of astronomers—­astronomers for three generations—­the Herschels.

CHAPTER II.

In the quiet city of Hanover, nearly a century and a half ago, lived a professor of music, by name Isaac Herschel, a Protestant in religion, though presumably of Jewish descent.  He had been left an orphan at the early age of eleven, and his friends wished him to adopt the vocation of a landscape-gardener; but being passionately fond of music, and having acquired some skill on the violin, he left Dresden, his birthplace, in order to seek his fortune; wandering from place to place, until at Hanover, in 1731, he obtained an engagement in the band of the Guards.  Soon afterwards he married; and by his wife, Anna Ilse Moritzen, had ten children, four of whom died in infancy.  Of the others, two—­a brother and a sister—­lived to distinguish themselves by their intellectual power; and all true lovers of science will regard with reverence the memories of William and Caroline Herschel.