section_path: Death/Personal life
section_name: Personal life
paragraph_text: Personal life
  
  As a great lover of Scottish poetry, Maxwell memorised poems and wrote his own. The best known is Rigid Body Sings, closely based on " Comin' Through the Rye " by Robert Burns, which he apparently used to sing while accompanying himself on a guitar. It has the opening lines
  
  Gin a body meet a body
  
  Flyin' through the air. Gin a body hit a body,
  
  Will it fly? And where?
  
  A collection of his poems was published by his friend Lewis Campbell in 1882.
  
  Descriptions of Maxwell remark upon his remarkable intellectual qualities being matched by social awkwardness.
  
  Maxwell wrote the following aphorism for his own conduct as a scientist:
  
  He that would enjoy life and act with freedom must have the work of the day continually before his eyes. Not yesterday's work, lest he fall into despair, not to-morrow's, lest he become a visionary not that which ends with the day, which is a worldly work, nor yet that only which remains to eternity, for by it he cannot shape his action. Happy is the man who can recognize in the work of to-day a connected portion of the work of life, and an embodiment of the work of eternity. The foundations of his confidence are unchangeable, for he has been made a partaker of Infinity. He strenuously works out his daily enterprises, because the present is given him for a possession.
  
  Maxwell was an evangelical Presbyterian and in his later years became an Elder of the Church of Scotland. Maxwell's religious beliefs and related activities have been the focus of a number of papers. Attending both Church of Scotland (his father's denomination) and Episcopalian (his mother's denomination) services as a child, Maxwell underwent an evangelical conversion in April 1853. One facet of this conversion may have aligned him with an antipositivist position.