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William Herschel was now, as to age, in mezzo cammin. He had numbered just so many years as had Dante when he began the “Divina Commedia.” But he had not, like Dante, been thrown off the rails of life. The rush of a successful professional career was irresistibly carrying him along. Almost any other man would have had all his faculties absorbed in it. Herschel’s were only stimulated by the occupations which it brought. Yet they were of a peculiarly absorbing nature. Music is the most exclusive of arts. In turning aside, after half a lifetime spent in its cultivation, to seek his ideal elsewhere, Herschel took an unparalleled course. And his choice was final. Music was long his pursuit, astronomy his pastime; a fortunate event enabled him to make astronomy his pursuit, while keeping music for a pastime.

Yet each demands a totally different kind of training, not only of the intellect, but of the senses. From his earliest childhood William Herschel’s nerves and brain had been specially educated to discriminate impressions of sound, and his muscles to the peculiar agility needed for their regulated and delicate production; while, up to the age of thirty-five, he had used his eyes no more purposefully than other people. The eye, nevertheless, requires cultivation as much as the ear. “You must not expect to see at sight,” he told Alexander Aubert, of Loam Pit Hill, in 1782. And he wrote to Sir William Watson: “Seeing is in some respects an art which must be learnt. Many a night have I been practising to see, and it would be strange if one did not acquire a certain dexterity by such constant practice.” A critical observation, he added, could no more be expected from a novice at the telescope than a performance of one of Handel’s organ-fugues from a beginner in music. In this difficult art of vision he rapidly became an adept. Taking into account the full extent of his powers, the opinion has been expressed, and can scarcely be contradicted, that he never had an equal.