At last the hour of her decision came; and both were made supremely happy by it. A week later he wrote her, "Every moment offers me fresh proof of the power you have over me. I could not at one time have thought it possible that I, that any man, could have been under the dominion of feelings so undivided and so intense: now I think that no other man can have felt or feel as I do." A year later they were married very quietly, he desiring their wedding day to be "just like any other day." Twenty-eight years later he wrote among the important dates and discoveries of his life, "June 12, 1821, he married,--an event which, more than any other, contributed to his earthly happiness and healthful state of mind. The union has nowise changed, except in the depth and strength of its character."
For forty-seven years "his dear Sarah" made life a joy to him. He rarely left home; but if so, as at the great gathering of British Scientists at Birmingham, he wrote back, "After all, there is no pleasure like the tranquil pleasure of home; and here, even here, the moment I leave the table, I wish I were with you IN QUIET. Oh, what happiness is ours! My runs into the world in this way only serve to make me esteem that happiness the more."
And now came twenty years in science that made Faraday the wonder and ornament of his age. Elected an F.R.S., he began at once twelve lectures in Chemical Manipulation before the London Institution, six on Chemical Philosophy before the Royal Society, published six papers on electromagnetism, and began a course of juvenile lectures which continued for nineteen years. This was one of the beautiful things of Faraday's life,--a great man living in a whirl of work, yet taking time to make science plain to the young. When asked at what age he would teach science, he replied that he had never found a child too young to understand him. For twenty years he lectured at the Royal Academy at Woolwich, became scientific adviser to the government with regard to lighthouses and buoys, not for gain, but for the public good, drew all London to his eloquent lectures with his brilliant experiments, Prince Albert attending with his sons; and published one hundred and fifty-eight scientific essays and thirty series of "Experimental Researches in Electricity," which latter, says Dr. Gladstone, "form one of the most marvellous monuments of intellectual work; one of the rarest treasure-houses of newly-discovered knowledge, with which the world has ever been enriched."