so glaring and beautiful that I could not
think of taking any place of its extent."

He was quite alone under the perfectly silent sky when this was written,
and he was at his post simply to make this and other such observations.
But the sky was beautiful to him, and his faithful sister, CAROLINA,
sitting below, has preserved for us the words as they dropped from his
lips.

On the 11th of January, 1787, HERSCHEL discovered two satellites to
_Uranus_.

After he had well assured himself of their existence, but before he
communicated his discovery to the world, he made this crucial test. He
prepared a sketch of _Uranus_ attended by his two satellites, as it
would appear on the night of February 10, 1787, and when the night
came, "the heavens displayed the original of my drawings, by showing in
the situation I had delineated them _the Georgian planet attended by two
satellites_. I confess that this scene appeared to me with additional
beauty, as the little secondary planets seemed to give a dignity to the
primary one which raises it into a more conspicuous situation among the
great bodies of the solar system.". . .

In a memoir of 1789, he has a few sentences which show the living way
in which the heavens appeared to him:

"This method of viewing the heavens seems to throw them into a new
kind of light.

"They are now seen to resemble a luxuriant garden, which contains
the greatest variety of productions in different flourishing beds;
and one advantage we may at least reap from it is, that we can, as
it were, extend the range of our experience to an immense duration.
For is it not almost the same thing whether we live successively to
witness the germination, blooming, foliage, fecundity, fading,
withering, and corruption of a plant, or whether a vast number of
specimens selected from every stage through which the plant passes
in the course of its existence be brought at once to our view?"

The thought here is no less finely expressed than it is profound. The
simile is perfect, if we have the power to separate among the vast
variety each state of being from every other, and if the very luxuriance
of illustration in the heavens does not bewilder and overpower the mind.
It was precisely this discriminating power that HERSCHEL possessed in
perfection.

There is a kind of humor in the way he records a change of opinion:

"I formerly supposed the surface of _Saturn's