But there were other visitors who were right welcome to a portion of his time. One day it might be a young man, whom a few kind words and a little attention on the part of the great philosopher would send forward on the journey of life with new energy and hopes. Another day it might be some intellectual chieftain, who could meet the prince of experimenters on equal terms. But these are hardly to be regarded as interruptions;--rather as a part of his chosen work.
Here is one instance in the words of Mr. Robert Mallet. "... I was, in the years that followed, never in London without paying him a visit, and on one of those times I ventured to ask him (if not too much engaged) to let me see where he and Davy had worked together. With the most simple graciousness he brought me through the whole of the Royal Institution, Albemarle Street. Brande's furnaces, Davy's battery, the place in the laboratory where he told me he had first observed the liquefaction of chlorine, are all vividly before me--but nothing so clear or vivid as our conversation over a specimen of green (crown) glass, partially devitrified in floating opaque white spheres of radiating crystals: he touched luminously on the obscure relation of the vitreous and crystalloid states, and on the probable nature of the nuclei of the white spheres. My next visit to Faraday that I recollect was not long after my paper 'On the Dynamics of Earthquakes' had appeared in the Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy. He almost at once referred to it in terms of praise that seemed to me so far beyond my due, that even now I recall the very humble way I felt, as the thought of Faraday's own transcendent merits rushed across my mind. I ventured to ask him, had the paper engaged his attention sufficiently that I might ask him--did he consider my explanation of the before supposed _vorticose_ shock sufficient? To my amazement he at once recited _nearly word for word_ the paragraph in which I took some pains to put my views into a demonstrative shape, and ended with, 'It is as plain and certain as a proposition of Euclid!' And yet the subject was one pretty wide away from his own objects of study."
Often, too, if some interesting fact was exhibited to him, he would send to his brother _savants_ some such note as this:--