On November 9, 1826, he writes to his mother from New York:—­

“Don’t think I have forgotten you all at home because I have been so remiss in writing you lately.  I feel guilty, however, in not stealing some little time just to write you one line.  I acknowledge my fault, so please forgive me and I will be a better boy in future.

“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.