and overwhelmed her with grief and de- Legal proceedings were shortly after spair, neither crushed her nor daunted her commenced against the princess for infi. courage. In her own mind she felt no delity to her husband. She was severely doubt whatever that the elector, as well interrogated, but nothing intimidated her as her husband and Madame von Platen, or caused her to answer the questions put were implicated in the foul deed. Horror, to her with any confusion, and when asked disgust, and hatred for the perpetrators if it were true that she intended to fly to of the murder were her overpowering| Wolfenbüttel, she replied in the affirma. emotions, and when her women entered tive, but no other attempt to convict her her chamber the next morning her resolu- out of her own mouth was successful. tion was taken. She sent a message to She met intimidation with serenity, perthe elector that she desired to speak with suasion with contempt and indifference, him. The electoral prince, who had been and the inquisitors were foiled. When all absent from Hanover for four-and-twenty these means had failed to induce confeshours, had arrived early in the morning sion, one more endeavor was made, which from his hunting-box, and had been re- surpassed all former ones in infamy and ceived by his father, who imparted to him baseness. An altar was erected in her the shocking event that had so over- apartment, candles were lit, ecclesiastics whelmed him with alarm and dismay. summoned, and there, in the presence of George received the news with no less certain members of the court, the officiatconsternation. Who could foretell the ing priest exhorted the suffering and insequel of such a disaster? upon whom sulted woman to confess her sin. With would rest the imputation of the crime? calm and reverent demeanor she apObeying the haughty summons of the proached the altar and received the Holy princess, Ernst August, followed by his Communion in token of her innocence. son, entered her apartment, and the two As she returned to her place after receivstood before her in trepidation and alarm. ing, she turned towards and addressed the After a moment's silence, during which Countess Platen, who stood at her right she surveyed them both with unflinching hand, and invited her to do the same. scorn and horror, "I have but a very few But even the black and wicked heart of the words to say to you," she said; "I will guilty woman shrank before this supreme not lower myself by assuring you of my ordeal; she was unprepared to steep herinnocence. I acknowledge the fault that self in the blasphemy involved in such an permitted Königsmarck to hold a place in action; and, muttering some feeble plea my heart; but the rest of my life shall be about her health, she hastily quitted the dedicated to my repentance. I have been scene wherein the accused had borne herthe cause of his death, and to me it re-self with dignified tranquillity, and the mains to avenge it, if it lays in my power." The elector, whose courage deserted him during the interview, implored her to be reasonable, and to reflect. He was indeed unused to such deeds, unskilled in the intricacies of assassination; he knew not what to think, what to say. His chief terror was, if the murder became known, that it would be laid at his door, and he assured her in passionate and agitated language that the fatal result was due to Königsmarck's resistance to his arrest, and that there was but one means whereby the terrible affair could be withheld from public notoriety and scandal, and she must now set herself to live peaceably with the prince her husband. "Sir," she answered, "I will never live with Königsmarck's murderer. If I am compelled to do so it will only be to avenge his death." Seeing that no impression could be made upon her, the elector quitted the room, beckoning his son, who had not spoken one word during the interview, to follow him, which be required no second bidding to do. accusers had entirely broken down in their attempts to crush and overwhelm her. The princess's demeanor at this trying juncture had not been without its effect on the elector. Even if the whole of his suspicions were not allayed, they were partially so, and he saw no reason why there should not be a reconciliation between his son and daughter-in-law. His earnest desire was to lull suspicion with regard to his own and his son's part in the affair, and to silence the wagging tongues of scandal which were agitating the air for Königsmarck's sudden disappearance had caused a considerable flutter in society; and while some found it convenient to accept the diligently circulated rumor that he had escaped to avoid arrest, there were others who affirmed that the bright. the brave, the gallant Philippe had fall r a victim to the wrath of the father and son, and that his blood was crying for vengeance from out the depths of the Hanoverian schloss. Again and again did Ernst August beseech bis daughter-in- | promise extracted from her father that be law to reconsider the position, and place would neither ask to see her nor combefore her the conditions by which she municate with her by any means whatever might regain her lost footing and reap- a pledge he fulfilled to the letter. Ahlpear as the wife of his son, and the dire den was a fortified place, and melancholy results that must follow her refusal; but and gloomy to a degree scarcely conceiv he could make no impression on her; her able. The household were bound by an good name, her future well-being, even oath to keep her from all communication the thoughts of her children, counted as with the outer world, but in order to give nothing when compared with the murder her imprisonment an air of dignity and of the man she had loved, the horrors of position she received the title of Duchess that dreadful night, and all the misery and of Ahlden. humiliations she had endured since her There is a curious particular with which unhappy marriage. "Tell your master," we have become acquainted since comshe said, when she was approached by mencing our sketch a legend so barbarone of his myrmidons with the threat that ous in its essence that but we learned it she would be ignominiously banished from the lips of one intimately acquainted from Hanover if she rejected his terms, with Hanover's secret histories we would "Tell your master that when I turn my refuse to receive as authentic. The teller, back on Hanover, all roads will be beauti- however, has undoubted right to the best ful in my eyes." Although she had often information concerning the convictions of given proofs of her resolute spirit, they those more immediately concerned. The were hardly prepared for the dauntless following are the details: Within the inand indomitable courage with which she nermost circles of the Hanoverian court faced their threatened vengeance. No it was known to some that the morning earthly consideration would induce her to after the murder, and while Philippe lay temporize or to move one inch in the dead in the room where his assassins had direction of submission or compromise. borne him, George caused the heart of They were aware if she proved her case the victim of Madame von Platen's reand obtained a divorce on her own ac- venge to be taken from the body, to be count, that they must yield up all the reduced to ashes, and thereafter to be pecuniary advantages they had gained by placed in a small leaden box, which in its the marriage, that George's succession to turn was fitted into a footstool, and that her inheritance would be barred, and this footstool was used by George the possibly also the ultimate union of Han- First to the end of his vindictive life, and over and Celle. A Consistorial Court that, moreover, it still exists. There is a was therefore called together, its mem- cold and bloodthirsty atmosphere envelopbers being chosen by the elector, illegal ing this action for which there seems to in its conformation, and containing in be absolutely no parallel in modern story itself no element whatever of justice or the fear of forgetting for a moment that impartiality. She was tortured by the the dead man was trapped, tortured, sivisits of lawyers, who strove to entrap her lenced, murdered the devilish desire to into unguarded admissions; but so slight possess a constant and tangible presence were the evidences they were able to col- of what was once the spring of his life, lect of misconduct as regarded Königs- the dead essence of his love, the mainmarck, that they abandoned the charge spring of his misfortune, and that all this altogether, and his name did not even was a joy and a pleasure to any human appear in the deed of accusation. The being indicates that the spirit of Nero and basis or it were more to the purpose to Caligula still obtained in Hanover in the call it the plot-resolved itself into the year of our Lord 1694. To us it appeared, feeble accusation of incompatibility of when the story was first told us, that it temper. Of this, then, she was found was strong evidence that George had been guilty, and a decree was passed for the privy to the crime; but there is no other dissolution of the marriage. George was whatever, and we can only recount the specifically permitted to re-marry, while facts as they were told to us, and repeat she was doomed to perpetual imprison- that all other circumstances point to the ment, and she was at once conveyed to probability that neither himself nor his the castle of Ahlden, surrounded by a father was concerned in its perpetration. staff of domestics selected by the elector and his son, and an armed group of gaolers. The most stringent rules were laid down for her safe keeping, and a Lord Lexington, who became British minister at Vienna at this time, was instructed at the outset of his embassy to investigate "this Königsmarck mystery; and William the Third, in response to the elector of Saxony's entreaties, had caused inquiries to be made by his representative, but with no satisfactory results. By degrees the matter faded into the past, no answer was given, and Lord Lexington does not seem to have been of much use to any one. It is a significant fact that the Hanoverians destroyed every document that bore on the story, and although some affirm that they were unwilling to hand down to posterity the proofs of the infidelity of Sophia Dorothea, it is surely more probable that they would have preferred to do this rather than suffer the ugly doubts to rest upon their own conduct, which was the inevitable alternative. Little remains to be told. Political irony decreed that the princess should be treated with the greatest ceremony. She drove daily, guarded by a cavalry escort, who surrounded her carriage with drawn swords. Her mother was permitted to visit her occasionally, but always in the presence of the elector's spies and dependants. The electoral prince, as is well known, became king of England, but this change in his position and life made none in hers. Later on, when the remorseless monarch was nearing his end, whether it was, as some said, that the prognostications of a soothsayer that his own demise would follow closely on hers, and that he deemed that her life would be safer under his own surveillance, or whether he feared to face death with so black a crime as his life-long persecution of his wife on his conscience, it is impossible to say; but he made overtures to her of reconciliation and pardon. Thirty years and more had elapsed since the events narrated, still loneliness and captivity, though they had broken her heart, had not quelled her spirit. Her scorn was as scathing, her resolution as unconquerable as in the days of yore. "If I am guilty," she said, "I am not worthy of being his wife; and if I am innocent he is not worthy of me." For two-and-thirty years she remained a prisoner within that dreary fastness. The peasants became used to seeing the sadlooking and beautiful lady as she was driven swiftly across Luneburg heath, guarded by the clattering dragoons. She was kind and generous to the poor, and interested herself in their welfare; but the one thing needful to make her life tolerable. that of congenial companionship was sternly denied her. But the longest day wears to a close, and every traveller, be he sinner or saint, arrives at his journey's end at last; and before passing through the great black portal of death-that portal that shuts out so relentlessly the mysteries beyond -haply he may look back on the dusty road and fading landscape with a sigh and a prayer, humbly trusting that on the other side he may meet with mercy, not justice; receive pity for his sorrows, not vengeance for his sins. Sophia Dorothea then, the consort of George, king of Great Britain and Ireland, but not his wife; the mother of the heir to that splendid inheritance, but a stranger to her son, finished her weary pilgrimage on the 2nd of November, 1726. She had been ailing for some months, but her condition had not been thought dangerous, so when she turned her tired face to the wall and breathed out her last desolate sigh, it caused a mild surprise to those about her. She was interred at Celle, in the gloomy vaults of whose temple she took her place amongst those scions of the house of Brunswick with whom she had been deemed unworthy to associate during her life. Two centuries have passed since the events which we have tried to bring before the reader, and the stair at the foot of which Königsmarck paused before he strode forward to meet his hidden foes is still shown in the Hanoverian schloss; and it was believed by many, in the days when kings still reigned in Hanover, and dispensed their princely hospitality in the royal abode, that on these occasions of revelry and mirth the pale and impalpable shade of the murdered Königsmarck haunted its precincts, and had been seen flitting across the courtyard with a bloody mark across its mouth. Further still, it was asserted that when Elizabeth von Platen lay dying, a prey to disease and stricken with blindness, her feeble and paralyzed tongue cried aloud to be delivered from the mute, accusing spirit that tormented her death-bed with its ghastly presence, and which, though blind to all earthly things, she yet saw. But Philippe remained inexorably sitting by her bedside until her own spirit took flight, and his shadow only melted away when she breathed her last. MILLICENT ERSKINE WEMYSS. From The Fortnightly Review. ON THE NEW STAR IN AURIGA.* even but extreme cases of the large class of variable stars which wax and wane in periods more or less regular? The more modern temporary stars did certainly exist before and do exist still. The star of 1866 may still be seen as an ordinary ninth magnitude star. So that of 1876 in Cygnus, which rose to the third magnitude, is still there as a star of about the fourteenth magnitude. To these probably may be added Tycho's star. The new star which makes the present WE depend so absolutely at every moment, and in every action upon the uniformity of nature, that any event which even appears to break in upon that uniformity cannot fail to interest us. Especially is this the case if a strange star appears among those ancient heavenly bodies, by the motions of which our time and the daily routine of life are regulated, and which through all ages have been to man the most august symbols of the un-year memorable, is indeed, so far as our changing. For, notwithstanding small charts go, without descent. It may well alterations due to the accumulated effects be that its usual magnitude is below that of changes of invisible slowness which are which would bring it within our catalogues everywhere in progress, the heavens, in and charts. Visibility and invisibility in their broad features, remain as they were our largest telescopes are but expressions of old. If Hipparchus could return to in terms of the power of the eye. The life, however changed the customs and photographic plate, untiring in its power the kingdoms of the earth might appear of accumulation, has brought to our knowlto him, in the heavens and the hosts edge multitudes of stars which shine, but thereof he would find himself at home. not for us. The energy of their radiation is too small to set up the changes in the retina upon which vision depends. In a recent photograph of n Argus, Mr. Russell, at Sydney, has brought into view a great crowd of stars, which until now have shone in vain for the dull eye of man. What, it will be asked, were the conditions under which so faint a star woke up suddenly into so great splendor? Such information as we have comes chiefly from that particular application of the spectroscope, by which we can measure motion in the line of sight. It is not too much to say that this method of observation has opened for us in the heavens a door through which we can look upon the internal motions of binary and multiple systems of stars, which otherwise must have remained forever concealed from us. By it we can, in many cases, see within the point-like image of a star a complex system of whirling suns, gigantic in size, and revolving at enormous speeds. A telescope fifty feet in diameter of aperture, even if it could ever be constructed, would fail to show close systems of stars which the prism easily lays open to our view. Only some nineteen times in about as many centuries have we any record that the eternal sameness of the midnight sky has been broken in upon by even the temporary presence of an unknown star; though there is no doubt that in the future, through the closer watch kept upon the sky by photography, a larger number of similar phenomena will be discovered. According to Pliny it was the sudden outburst into splendor of a new star in 130 B.C. which inspired Hipparchus to construct his catalogue of stars. Passing at once to more modern times we come to the famous new star of 1572, discovered by Tycho Brahe, in the constellation of Cassiopeia, which outshone Venus, and could even be seen as a bright object upon the sky by day. Its brilliancy, like that of the new stars before and since, was transitory; within a few weeks its great glory had departed from it, and it then waned on until, at last, it had fallen back to its original low estate, as a star invisible to the naked eye. The star of 1866, which on May 2 of that year burst forth as a star of the second magnitude in the Northern Crown, is memorable as the This method of using the spectroscope, first of these objects which was subjected which the writer first applied successfully to the searching power of the spectro- to the heavenly bodies some twenty-four scope. Two temporary stars have ap-years ago, is now too well known for it to peared since, in 1876, and in 1885. be necessary to say more than that the change of wave-length, or pitch, of the light shows itself in the spectrum by the lines being shifted; towards the blue for an approach, towards the red if the lightsource and the observer are moving from each other. Are these strange objects in reality new stars, the creations of a day, or but the transient outbursts into splendor of small stars usually invisible? May they be The substance of a discourse given at the Royal Institution on Friday evening, May 13, 1892. The stars, as seen from the earth, are moving in all directions, but the prism, | Happily the days are not yet over when tems. It is obvious that a star moving round in an orbit, unless the plane of the orbit is across the line of sight, has alternate periods of approach and recession. A line in its spectrum will be seen to swing backwards and forwards relatively to a terrestrial line of the same substance in times corresponding to the star's orbital period. It is equally clear that if in a binary system both stars are bright, the spectrum will be a compound one, the spectrum of one star superposed upon that of the other. If the spectra are identical, all the lines will be really double, but apparently single when the stars have no relative motion; and will separate and close up as the stars go round. It was by this method, from the motions of the variable star Algol, photographed at Potsdam, that the dusky companion which periodically eclipses its light in part, stood revealed; and a similar discovery was made there of the companion of Spica. Of these double stars only one companion was bright, but by the opening and closing of double lines in the spectrum of Mizar, Professor Pickering brought to light a pair of gigantic blazing suns equal together to forty times the sun's mass, and whirling round their common centre of gravity with the speed of some fifty miles a second. Then followed, also at the Harvard observatory, the discovery in 6 Auriga, of an order of close binary stars hitherto unknown. The pair revolve with a speed of seventy miles a second within some seven and a half millions of miles of each other. As soon as the news reached Cambridge, U.S., Professor Pickering, by means of photographs which had been taken there, was able to cause the part of the sky where the new star appeared to pass again under examination, as it had appeared at successive intervals during the last six years, but with the result that the new star's place had remained unoccupied all that time by any star so bright as the eleventh magnitude. For about a year a closer watch has been kept upon the sky at Cambridge by means of a photographic transit instrument driven by clockwork, which automatically patrols the sky every clear night, and registers all stars as bright as the sixth magnitude in a great zone sixty degrees in breadth, and three hours of right ascension in length. On December Ist the nova was not recorded, but the next clear night, December 10, it was already of the fifth magnitude.* Dr. Max Wolf photographed this part of Auriga on December 8, including all stars to the ninth magnitude, but the nova was not on the plate. The star therefore must have sprung up from below the ninth magnitude to the fifth within two days at the longest. On Professor Pickering's plates taken in December, the nova appears without any surrounding nebulosity. This point, which has been in dispute, appears to be settled by a plate taken with an exposure of three hours by Mr. Roberts, which fails to show any appearance of a surrounding nebula, though a similar accumulation of the light-action of the Pleiades fills the whole background with nebulæ. The nova was discovered at the end of January by Mr. Anderson, and from February I was observed at many observatories. Its magnitude then was about the fourth and one-half magnitude. Though its light showed continual fluctuations, a slow but steady decline set in, carrying it down to about the sixth magnitude in the these swayings to and fro of its light, set up doubtless by the commotions attendant on the cause of its outburst, calmed down, and the star fell rapidly and with great regularity to about the eleventh magnitude on March 24, and by the beginning of Now it was by this method of spectroscopic observation that the remarkable state of things existing in the new star I was revealed to us. It is not a little sur-early days of March; but after March 7, prising that a new star, as bright as the fifth magnitude, could burst out almost directly overbead in the heavens, and yet remain undiscovered for nearly seven weeks. Europe and the United States bristle every clear night with telescopes from open observatories, which are served by an army of astronomers; yet the disIcovery of the new star was left to an amateur, Mr. Anderson, possessed only of a small pocket-telescope and a star-chart. Professor Pickering informs the writer that the new star was still visible at Harvard Observatory on April 26. Its magnitude was then scarcely lower than at the beginning of the month, on the scale of their meridian photometer, 14'5. |