A most interesting and pleasant trip, too, may be taken to Hampton Court Green, where a visit can be paid to the house, the use of which Her Majesty the Queen so kindly gave to the Professor, and where he passed the greater part of the last ten years of his life. Of the very many visitors to the famous palace and gardens of Hampton Court, there are, I fear, not a very large proportion who notice the charming little house facing the Green, and not far from the entrance to the Palace where the Professor lived. "Faraday House," however, appears much the same as it did when he whose name it now bears was living there. With its front all overgrown with ivy and Virginian creeper, with its creeper-bowered archway from the gate to the front door, with its trees and shrubs all along the front, and with its view across the Green to the trees in the Palace grounds beyond, the old-fashioned house has a delightful aspect, and seems indeed an ideal spot to which a man of Faraday's simple, unpretentious, yet nature-loving character, could retire after a long life of arduous and useful work.
The following "in memoriam" poem, which appeared in the pages of Punch shortly after Faraday's death, so beautifully sums up much of the man's life and character, that it may be fittingly quoted as a conclusion to this short account of the life of the illustrious philosopher, a life which must impress all who have studied it as one of the purest and most unselfish of which we have any record.
"Statesmen and soldiers, authors, artists,—still
The topmost leaves fall off our English oak:
Some in green summer's prime, some in the chill
Of autumn-tide, some by late winter's stroke.
Another leaf has dropped on that sere heap—
One that hung highest; earliest to invite
The golden kiss of morn, and last to keep
The fire of eve—but still turned to the light.