At seventy-one he wrote to Mrs. Faraday from Glasgow, "My head is full, and my heart also; but my recollection rapidly fails. You will have to resume your old function of being a pillow to my mind, and a rest,--a happy-making wife." Still he continued to make able reports to the government on lighthouses, electric machines, steam-engines, and the like.
And then for two years the memory grew weaker, the body feebler, and he was, as he told a friend, "just waiting." He died in his chair in his study, August 25th, 1867, and was buried in Highgate Cemetery. Westminster Abbey would have opened her doors to him, but he requested to be buried "in the simplest earthly place, with a gravestone of the most ordinary kind." On a plain marble slab in the midst of clustering ivy are his name and the dates of his birth and death. One feels a strange tenderness of heart as he stands beside this sacred spot where rests one, who, though elected to seventy societies, and offered nearly one hundred titles and tokens of honor, said he "would remain plain Michael Faraday to the last."
Wonderful man! great in mind, noble in heart, and gentle in manner, having brought a strong nature under the most complete discipline. His energy, his devotion to a single object, his untiring work, and his beautiful character carried the blacksmith's son to the highest success.
A little way from London, England, at Denmark Hill, looking toward the Crystal Palace, is a mansion which is fit for royalty. The grounds, covering from thirty to forty acres, are beautifully terraced, dotted here and there with lakelets, fountains, and artificial caverns, while the great clumps of red rhododendron, yellow laburnum, pink hawthorne, and white laurel make an exquisitely colored picture. The home itself is spacious and inviting, with its elegant conservatory and rare works of art. The owner of this house, Sir Henry Bessemer, is cordial and gracious; and from his genial face and manner, no one would imagine that his life had been one long struggle with obstacles.
Born in Charlton, a little county town in Hertfordshire, Jan. 19, 1813, he received the rudiments of an education like other boys in the neighborhood. His father, Anthony Bessemer, an inventor, seeing that his son was inclined to mechanics, bought him, in London, a five-inch foot-lathe, and a book which described the art of turning. Day after day, in the quiet of his country home, he studied and practised turning, and modelling in clay.