Queenwood, 15th, Feb, 1853.
Dear Prof Faraday
I never calculated on my expenses being paid, but am perfectly content to abide by your usual practice on such occasions – My travelling expenses are the only ones worth naming and they amounted to about thirty shillings – This sum I shall be equally contented to receive or not to receive.
When a man feels deeply on any point I believe as a general rule he will not talk much about it. I once heard the silence of Goethe1 for a year during which he was in love with a girl in Frankfort2 accounted for in this way, and I have always thought the hypothesis a probable one. Friday night3 is to me what his sweetheart was to Goethe – I shall never forget it but cannot well write about it.4 The memory of it I trust will serve to keep me more loyally to my task, to assure me when I doubt, to strengthen me when I falter and to establish my faith in a sentiment which I have met somewhere in your own writings, that the patient and conscientious investigator of natural truth is ever sure of his reward
Believe me dear Professor | Most sincerely Yours | John Tyndall
RI MS JT/TYP/12/4022
Faraday Correspondence, 4:2638
Goethe: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), German writer and philosopher.
Frankfort: Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Friday night: Tyndall’s talk of the evening of 11 February, his first at the RI, entitled ‘On the Influence of Material Aggregation Upon the Manifestations of Force’ (Roy. Inst. Proc., vol. 1, pp. 254–9). He conducted several experiments on diamagnetism.
cannot well write about it: Tyndall gives a summary of the lecture in letter 0713.
Please cite as “Tyndall0712,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on