Morse now wrote cheerfully to his wife: "When I consider how wonderfully things are working for the promotion of the great and long desired event,—that of being constantly with my dear family,—all unpleasant feelings are absorbed in this joyful anticipation, and I look forward to the spring of the year with delightful prospects of seeing my dear family permanently settled with me in our own hired house here."
February 8, 1825, he wrote his wife that he had met Lafayette, "the man whose beloved name has rung from one end of this continent to the other, whom all flock to see, whom all delight to honor."
That very day a letter was penned him, not this time by the wife, but by his father. "My affectionately beloved son: Mysterious are the ways of Providence. My heart is in pain and deeply sorrowful, while I announce to you the sudden and unexpected death of your dear and deservedly loved wife. Her death proved to be an affection of the heart, incurable had it been known.... I wrote you yesterday that she was convalescent. So she then appeared and so the doctor pronounced. She was up about five o'clock yesterday afternoon, to have her bed made, as usual; was unusually cheerful and social; spoke of the pleasure of being with her dear husband in New York ere long; stepped into bed herself, fell back, with a momentary struggle, on her pillow; her eyes were immediately fixed, the paleness of death overspread her countenance, and in five minutes more, without the slightest motion, her mortal life terminated.
"It happened that, just at this moment, I was entering her chamber-door, with Charles in my arms, to pay her my usual visit, and to pray with her. The nurse met me affrighted, calling for help. Your mother, the family, and neighbors, full of the tenderest sympathy and kindness, and the doctor, thronged the house in a few minutes; everything was done that could be done, to save her life. But her appointed time had come, and no earthly skill or power could stay the hand of death. It was the Lord who gave her to you, the chiefest of all your earthly blessings, and it is he that has taken her away; and may you be enabled, my son, from the heart to say, 'Blessed be the name of the Lord!'"
The heart of Morse was well nigh broken. The woman he had idolized had gone from him in a moment. He wrote back to his father: "Oh, is it possible? is it possible? Shall I never see my dear wife again? But I cannot trust myself to write on the subject. I need your prayers, and those of Christian friends, to God for support. I fear I shall sink under it.
"Oh, take good care of her dear children!
"Your agonized son,
"Finley."
Travelling by stage, he did not reach New Haven till his wife had been buried a week. A month later he wrote to a friend: "I dare not yet give myself up to the full survey of its desolating effects; every day brings to my mind a thousand new and fond connections with dear Lucretia, all now ruptured. I feel a dreadful void, a heart-sickness, which time does not seem to heal, but rather to aggravate. You know the intensity of the attachment which existed between dear L. and me, never for a moment interrupted by the smallest cloud; an attachment founded, I trust, in the purest love, and daily strengthening by all the motives which the ties of nature and more especially of religion furnish.
"I found in dear L. everything that I could wish. Such ardor of affection, so uniform, so unaffected, I never saw nor read of, but in her. My fear with regard to the measure of my affection toward her, was not that I might fail of 'loving her as my own flesh,' but that I should put her in the place of Him who has said, 'Thou shalt have no other gods but me.' I felt this to be my greatest danger, and to be saved from this idolatry was often the subject of my earnest prayers. If I had desired anything in my dear L. different from what she was, it would have been that she had been less lovely. My whole soul seemed wrapped up in her; with her was connected all that I expected of happiness on earth."