Fernando Wood gave the most interesting account of the struggle and despair, but final triumph, of Professor Morse in his attempts to make the Government aid him in his undertaking. Mr. Wood is the only man in Congress who was a member of that body at the time the inventor was pleading his cause. Professor Morse first laid his plans before his own Government, and they were rejected. He then went abroad, was absent two years, going, as did Columbus, from court to court, obscure, unheard, unnoticed. All undaunted, he came home, to try for the last time to bring his wonderful discovery before the world. It was this period of his life that the Hon. Fernando Wood brought so vividly before the audience. With the mind’s eye the vast congregation could see a threadbare, dejected man traversing the streets of Washington, modestly attempting to electrify Congress with a flash of his own genius. At last, when he was slowly settling into the depths of despair, he had the supreme happiness of learning that in the very last hours of a session a modest amount had been appropriated to carry out his apparently insane undertaking.
Facing the speakers of the evening hung a portrait of the departed. It was surrounded by a white groundwork, inlaid with an inscription in green letters: “What God hath wrought.” It was the picture of a man in the winter of life, with hair and beard of snow; a face not classically made, but with fine, manly features, that must have glowed with indestructible beauty when lit up by the enthusiastic genius within.
Samuel F. B. Morse has gone the way of all the earth. He lived to know that his name had been spoken by the intellectual world from pole to pole. No more honor could be bestowed upon his ashes; and his memory is embalmed in the soul of his country.
One of the speakers of the evening said that Professor Morse was born the same year that Benjamin Franklin died, and the lives of the two men seemed like joining a broken thread. And this reminds the writer of a man who might have been seen in that audience who to-day is trying on the same field to get Congress to help him to demonstrate to the people that wires and batteries and Atlantic cables are only so much waste matter; that from given points anywhere on the world’s surface that same lightning which Franklin brought to earth with his kite can be harnessed to do his bidding. He has got his patent, his invention, and his faith. As with Morse, Congress is afraid to “establish a precedent,” and so another inventor goes begging his way, perhaps to immortal fame.
Olivia.
[ON THE PROMENADE.]
A Saturday Holiday With Its Strollers And Equipages.
Washington, April 22, 1872.