Your letter, which arrived this morning, confirms the apprehension which the absence of any news from you during the last month had begun to excite, that you were unwell, and has caused us the liveliest sorrow. How I wish we were near you, that dear M. could be with you and nurse you. But the same kind Providence which has preserved you so long in health will not fail you in sickness. Meanwhile, I pray and entreat you not to decline the attendance of our good Dr. Mühry, or to avail yourself of any comforts that Hanover can afford. We shall look most anxiously for further accounts from Mde. Knipping, or if her family distresses will not allow her (as you say she has lost her mother very lately), from the kind pen of Miss Beckedorff, and I hope they will not wait for the messenger, but write by the post, and that immediately, as soon as this reaches your hands. Still I trust to see many more letters in your own handwriting, and that the cessation of the very severe weather we have had of late will prove beneficial in restoring your strength, to enable you to face the farther progress of the season, which, if your climate is anything like ours, is always worse in February than at Christmas.... I am working still hard at my book (of which you will have by this time received the first four hundred pages), but I cannot get on quite so fast as I would, and I greatly fear it will not be out by Christmas. SIR JOHN HERSCHEL TO MISS HERSCHEL. _July 11, 1847._ MY DEAR AUNT,— I send to the messenger who will take this, a copy of my “Cape Observations” for you, and I hope it will not be too large for him to take. You will then have in your hands the completion of my father’s work—“The Survey of the Nebulous Heavens.” I hope you will be able to look at the figures (the engravings of the principal nebulæ). As to the letter-press, the Introduction will perhaps interest you, and I daresay Miss Beckedorff or Mde. Knipping will be kind enough to read it to you—a little at a time. A copy is on its way I presume by this time to His Majesty the King of Hanover, as a testimony of respect to a sovereign who has shown you on many occasions such kind attentions. Louisa sends you all our news, and the autographs of Struve and Adams, who, with M. Leverrier, are now at Collingwood. Adieu, dear aunt, From your ever-affectionate nephew, J. F. W. HERSCHEL. [Sidenote: 1847. _Latter Days._] But the time was past when such gifts could be acknowledged with the old enthusiasm, though the faculty to appreciate them had not failed, and we can well imagine how nothing in the power of man to bestow could have given her such pleasure on her death-bed as this last crowning completion of her brother’s work.