Mine I saved, and hold complete.
Do your joys with age diminish?
When mine fail me I'll complain.
Must in death your daylight finish?
My sun sets to rise again."
Robert Browning.
The year of the Great Exhibition was a busy one for Faraday; he was working in his old accustomed, unremitting manner at his magnetic, and electric, and general experiments, he was continuing to write those Experimental Researches which he sent in to the Royal Society, and upon which rests so large a part of his reputation as a scientist. He had given up his professorship at Woolwich Academy the previous year. He was lecturing, however, a good deal, and not alone on his own account, for during the summer he delivered a lecture on ozone for his good friend Professor Schönbein. His health, however, was far from being as good as it had been, and he had to take frequent rests; so that, although he was working as earnestly and enthusiastically as ever, it was, so to speak, only intermittently. That the loss of memory from which he had before suffered was still afflicting him at times, is made evident by such passages from his letters as the following pathetic one from a letter to Schönbein: "I have no doubt I answer your letters very badly; but, my dear friend, do you remember that I forget, and that I can no more help it than a sieve can help the water running out of it. Still you know me to be your old and obliged and affectionate friend, and all I can say is, the longer I know you the more I seem to cling to you. Ever, my dear Schönbein, yours affectionately."
A pathetic interest attaches to the following reminiscence of Faraday by his niece (Miss Jane Barnard); she was reading to him an anecdote of the Duke of Marlborough's intimation to the king that as he felt that the time when his faculties would fade had arrived he did not wish again to attend any Council meeting, and that if he should attend he desired that no heed should be given to anything he said. Faraday after listening attentively to it, asked Miss Barnard to read that anecdote to him if at any time she felt that his judgment no longer controlled his wishes.
So numerous were the honours which were showered upon Michael Faraday during the last forty years of his life, that to enumerate them would be as tedious as it would be profitless; suffice it to say that he was elected a member of all the chief scientific and philosophical bodies in Europe. Indeed it is said that a Continental Professor addressed a letter to him as "Professor Michael Faraday, Member of all the learned Societies of Europe." It is worthy of note, however, that he was elected a member of the Senate of the University of London, and was asked to act as examiner for the same body, but declined.
During the periods of rest which his failing health made necessary, Faraday would go off to Brighton or Hastings with his wife, where he would spend a few days in quiet idleness. In February, 1851, he was at Brighton, where Mr. Masquerier, the French refugee who had in early life given him lessons in geometry, was living. In Crabb Robinson's diary the following entry, which is of much interest to us here, occurs against February 18: "(At Masquerier's, Brighton.) We had calls soon after breakfast. The one to be mentioned was that of Faraday, one of the most remarkable men of the day, the very greatest of our discoverers in chemistry, a perfect lecturer in the unaffected simplicity and intelligent clearness in his statement; so that the learned are instructed and the ignorant charmed. His personal character is admirable. When he was young, poor, and altogether unknown, Masquerier was kind to him; and now that he is a great man he does not forget his old friend."