CHAP. XIII.] CONCLUSION. 429 



conductor for King's College Chapel (a building which 

 he greatly loved) Maxwell called and made a verbal 

 explanation which was unintelligible, but in going 

 away he fortunately left a written statement, and this 

 was perfectly clear. 



The Galloway boy was in many ways the father of 

 the Cambridge man ; and even the " ploys " of his 

 childhood contained a germ of his life-work. Indeed, 

 it may be said that with him, despite the popular 

 adage, ," Work when you work," etc., play was always 

 passing into work and work into play. In twirling 

 his magic discs, his mind was already busied about 

 the cause of optical phenomena. He plied the devil- 

 on-two-sticks with the same eager industry, and with 

 the same simple enjoyment, with which he afterwards 

 spun his dynamical top. And amidst his profoundest 

 investigations, whether about the Eings of Saturn 

 or the Lines of Force, or the molecular structure of 

 material things, the playful spirit of his boyhood was 

 ever ready to break forth. Meanwhile, alike beneath 

 the grave and sparkling mood, a spirit of deep PIETY 

 pervaded all he did, whether in the most private rela- 

 tions of life, or in his position as an appointed teacher 

 and investigator, or in his philosophic contemplation 

 of the universe. There is no attribute from which 

 the thought of him is more inseparable. 



He had keen sympathy with ideal aspirations, 

 together with an occasional sense of their fruitless- 

 ness. " It's no use thinking of the chap ye might 

 have been." When, in their early married life, Mrs. 

 Maxwell was oppressed with a sense of failure in her 



