'Ventnor, Isle of Wight, June 28, 1854.
'My Dear Tyndall,—You see by the top of this letter how much habit prevails over me; I have just read yours from thence, and yet I think myself there. However, I have left its science in very good keeping, and I am glad to learn that you are at experiment once more. But how is the health? Not well, I fear. I wish you would get yourself strong first and work afterwards. As for the fruits, I am sure they will be good, for though I sometimes despond as regards myself, I do not as regards you. You are young, I am old.... But then our subjects are so glorious, that to work at them rejoices and encourages the feeblest; delights and enchants the strongest.
'I have not yet seen anything from Magnus. Thoughts of him always delight me. We shall look at his black sulphur together. I heard from Schonbein the other day. He tells me that Liebig is full of ozone, i.e., of allotropic oxygen.
'Good-bye for the present.
'Ever, my dear Tyndall,
'Yours truly,
'M. Faraday.'
The contemplation of Nature, and his own relation to her, produced in Faraday a kind of spiritual exaltation which makes itself manifest here. His religious feeling and his philosophy could not be kept apart; there was an habitual overflow of the one into the other.
Whether he or another was its exponent, he appeared to take equal delight in science. A good experiment would make him almost dance with delight. In November, 1850, he wrote to me thus:—'I hope some day to take up the point respecting the magnetism of associated particles. In the meantime I rejoice at every addition to the facts and reasoning connected with the subject. When science is a republic, then it gains: and though I am no republican in other matters, I am in that.' All his letters illustrate this catholicity of feeling. Ten years ago, when going down to Brighton, he carried with him a little paper I had just completed, and afterwards wrote to me. His letter is a mere sample of the sympathy which he always showed to me and my work.
'Brighton, December 9, 1857.