were brought her of hopes at last fulfilled, and thought longingly of the seven-feet reflector, with which she used to sweep the heavens, as it stood in the room beside her, but which she should never use again.
"How I envy you having seen Bessel," she wrote to her nephew in 1842—"the man who found us the parallax of 61 Cygni."[1]
"The seven-foot shall stand in my room, and be my monument," she wrote to her nephew in 1823; what to do with it was a puzzle to her. Her sweeper she thought of leaving to her girlhood's friend's daughter. Miss Beckedorff, but in 1840 it was consigned to "the hands of the good, honest creature, Dr. Hausmann." "The five-foot Newtonian reflector," she wrote that same year,[2] "is in the hands of the Royal Astronomical Society, and will be preserved by it as the little telescope of Newton is by the Royal Society, long after I and all the little ones are dead and gone." It was a source of justifiable pride to her as she neared the end.
Faithful to the memory and greatness of her departed brother, she resented every attempt at an imperfect or unworthy presentation of his life and works. What she should have done herself, and she had better means than others of doing it truthfully and faithfully, she left to the ignorant or the conceited to attempt. She could only rail at their efforts, and wish they had left the work alone. It was not just to them or to him. The world wishes to know something of those whose greatness of mind or achievement has enriched humanity or extended its knowledge of
