One of the last acts of his life was to go down town with his youngest son, whose birthday was the 29th of March, to purchase for him his first gold watch, and that watch the son still carries, a precious memento of his father.
Gradually the pains in the head grew less severe, but great weakness followed, and he was compelled to keep to his bed, sinking into a peaceful, painless unconsciousness relieved by an occasional flash of his old vigor. To his pastor, Reverend Dr. William Adams, he expressed his gratitude for the goodness of God to him, but added: "The best is yet to come." He roused himself on the 29th of March, the birthday of his son, kissing him and gazing with pleasure on a drawing sent to the boy by his cousin, Mary Goodrich, pronouncing it excellent.
Shortly before the end pneumonia set in, and one of the attending physicians, tapping on his chest, said "This is the way we doctors telegraph"; and the dying man, with a momentary gleam of the old humor lighting up his fading eyes, whispered, "Very good." These were the last words spoken by him.
From a letter written by one who was present at his bedside to another member of the family I shall quote a few words: "He is fast passing away. It is touching to see him so still, so unconscious of all that is passing, waiting for death. He has suffered much with neuralgia of the head, increased of late by a miserable pamphlet by F.O.J.S. Poor dear man! Strange that they could not leave him in peace in his old age. But now all sorrow is forgotten. He lies quiet infant. Heaven is opening to him with its peace and perfect rest. The doctor calls his sickness 'exhaustion of the brain.' He looks very handsome; the light of Heaven seems shining on his beautiful eyes."
On April 1, consciousness returned for a few moments and he recognized his wife and those around him with a smile, but without being able to speak. Then he gradually sank to sleep and on the next day he gently breathed his last.
His faithful and loving friend, James D. Reid, in the Journal of the Telegraph, of which he was editor, paid tribute to his memory in the following touching words:—
"In the ripeness and mellow sunshine of the end of an honored and protracted life Professor Morse, the father of the American Telegraph system, our own beloved friend and father, has gone to his rest. The telegraph, the child of his own brain, has long since whispered to every home in all the civilized world that the great inventor has passed away. Men, as they pass each other on the street, say, with the subdued voice of personal sorrow, 'Morse is dead.' Yet to us he lives. If he is dead it is only to those who did not know him.
"It is not the habit of ardent affection to be garrulous in the excitement of such an occasion as this. It would fain gaze on the dead face in silence. The pen, conscious of its weakness, hesitates in its work of endeavoring to reveal that which the heart can alone interpret in a language sacred to itself, and by tears no eye may ever see. For such reason we, who have so much enjoyed the sweetness of the presence of this venerable man, now so calm in his last sacred sleep, to whom he often came, with his cheerful and gentle ways, as to a son, so confiding of his heart's tenderest thoughts, so free in the expression of his hopes of the life beyond, find difficulty in making the necessary record of his decease. We can only tell what the world has already known by the everywhere present wires, that, on the evening of Tuesday, April 2, Professor Morse, in the beautiful serenity of Christian hope, after a life extended beyond fourscore years, folded his hands upon his breast and bade the earth, and generation, and nation he had honored, farewell."
In the "Evening Post," probably from the pen of his old friend William
Cullen Bryant, was the following:—
"The name of Morse will always stand in the foremost rank of the great inventors, each of whom has changed the face of society and given a new direction to the growth of civilization by the application to the arts of one great thought. It will always be read side by side with those of Gutenberg and Schoeffer, or Watt and Fulton. This eminence he fairly earned by one splendid invention. But none who knew the man will be satisfied to let this world-wide and forever growing monument be the sole record of his greatness.