"The fact is I have been engaged for the last three days during all my leisure moments in something unusual with me,—I mean electioneering. 'Oh! what a sad boy!' mother will say. 'There he is leaving everything at sixes and sevens, and driving through the streets, and busying himself about those poison politics.' Not quite so fast, however.
"I have not neglected my own affairs, as you will learn one of these days. I have an historical picture to paint, which will occupy me for some time, for a proprietor of a steamboat which is building in Philadelphia to be the most splendid ever built. He has engaged historical pictures of Allston, Vanderlyn, Sully, and myself, and landscapes of the principal landscape painters, for a gallery on board the boat. I consider this as a new and noble channel for the encouragement of painting, and in such an enterprise and in such company I shall do my best.
"What do you think of sparing me for about one year to visit Paris and Rome to finish what I began when in Europe before? My education as a painter is incomplete without it, and the time is rapidly going away when my age will render it impossible to profit by such studies, even if I should be able, at a future time, to visit Europe again…. I can, perhaps, leave my dear little ones at their age better than if they were more advanced, and, as my views are ultimately to benefit them, I think no one will accuse me of neglecting them. If they do, they know but little of my feelings towards them."
The mother's answer to this letter has not been preserved, but whether she dissuaded him from going at that time, or whether other reasons prevented him, the fact is that he did not start on the voyage to Europe (the return trip proving so momentous to himself and to the world) until exactly three years later.
I shall pass rapidly over these intervening three years. They were years of hard work, but of work rewarded by material success and increasing honor in the community.
On May 8, 1827, on the occasion of the first anniversary of the National Academy of Design, Morse, its president, delivered an address before a brilliant audience in the chapel of Columbia College. This address was considered so remarkable that, at the request of the Academy, it was published in pamphlet form. It called forth a sharp review in the "North American," which voiced the opinions of those who were hostile to the new Academy, and who considered the term "National" little short of arrogant. Morse replied to this attack in a masterly manner in the "Journal of Commerce," and this also was published in pamphlet form and ended the controversy.
In the year 1827, Professor James Freeman Dana, of Columbia College, delivered a series of lectures on the subject of electricity at the New York Athenæum. Professor Dana was an enthusiast in the study of that science, which, at that time, was but in its infancy, and he foresaw great and beneficial results to mankind from this mysterious force when it should become more fully understood.
Morse, already familiar with the subject from his experiments with Professor Silliman in New Haven, took a deep interest in these lectures, and he and Professor Dana became warm friends. The latter, on his side a great admirer of the fine arts, spent many hours in the studio of the artist, discussing with him the two subjects which were of absorbing interest to them both, art and electricity. In this way Morse became perfectly familiar with the latest discoveries in electrical science, so that when, a few years later, his grand conception of a simple and practicable means of harnessing this mystic agent to the uses of mankind took form in his brain, it found a field already prepared to receive it. I wish to lay particular emphasis on this point because, in later years, when his claims as an inventor were bitterly assailed in the courts and in scientific circles, it was asserted that he knew nothing whatever of the science of electricity at the time of his invention, and that all its essential features were suggested to him by others.
In the year 1828, Morse again changed his quarters, moving to a suite of rooms at No. 13 Murray Street, close to Broadway, for which he paid a "great rent," $500, and on May 6 of that year he writes to his mother:
"Ever since I left you at New Haven I have been over head and ears in arrangements of every kind. It is the busiest time of the whole year as it regards the National Academy. We have got through the arrangement of our exhibition and yesterday opened it to the guests of the Academy. We had the first people in the city, ladies and gentlemen, thronging the room all day, and the voice of all seemed to be—'It is the best exhibition of the kind that has been seen in the city.'