With a heavy heart, but bravely determining not to be overwhelmed by this crushing blow, Morse took up his work again.  He finished the portrait of Lafayette, and it now hangs in the City Hall in New York.  Writing of it many years later to a gentleman who had made some enquiries concerning it, he says:—­

“In answer to yours of the 8th instant, just received, I can only say it is so long since I have seen the portrait I painted of General Lafayette for the City of New York, that, strange to say, I find it difficult to recall even its general characteristics.

“That portrait has a melancholy interest for me, for it was just as I had commenced the second sitting of the General at Washington that I received the stunning intelligence of Mrs. Morse’s death, and was compelled abruptly to suspend the work.  I preserve, as a gratifying memorial, the letter of condolence and sympathy sent in to me at the time by the General, and in which he speaks in flattering terms of the promise of the portrait as a likeness.

“I must be frank, however, in my judgment of my own works of that day.  This portrait was begun under the sad auspices to which I have alluded, and, up to the close of the work, I had a series of constant interruptions of the same sad character.  A picture painted under such circumstances can scarcely be expected to do the artist justice, and as a work of art I cannot praise it.  Still, it is a good likeness, was very satisfactory to the General, and he several times alluded to it in my presence in after years (when I was a frequent visitor to him in Paris) in terms of praise.

“It is a full-length, standing figure, the size of life.  He is represented as standing at the top of a flight of steps, which he has just ascended upon a terrace, the figure coming against a glowing sunset sky, indicative of the glory of his own evening of life.  Upon his right, if I remember, are three pedestals, one of which is vacant as if waiting for his bust, while the two others are surmounted by the busts of Washington and Franklin—­the two associated eminent historical characters of his own time.  In a vase on the other side is a flower-the helianthus—­with its face toward the sun, in allusion to the characteristic stern, uncompromising consistency of Lafayette-a trait of character which I then considered, and still consider, the great prominent trait of that distinguished man.”

Morse, like many men who have excelled in one branch of the fine arts, often made excursions into one of the others.  I find among his papers many scraps of poetry and some more ambitious efforts, and while they do not, perhaps, entitle him to claim a poet’s crown, some of them are worthy of being rescued from oblivion.  The following sonnet was sent to Lafayette under the circumstances which Morse himself thus describes:—­

“Written on the loss of a faithful dog of Lafayette’s on board the steamboat which sank in the Mississippi.  The dog, supposing his master still on board, could not be persuaded to leave the cabin, but perished with the vessel.