“After taking my leave I succeeded with difficulty in pressing my way through the crowd within and without the hotel, and have just got into my quiet library and must now retire, for I am too fatigued to do anything but sleep.  Good-night.”

A short time after this the election was held, and this enthusiastic advocate of what he considered the right learned the bitter lesson that crowds, and shouting, and surface enthusiasm do not carry an election.  The voice of that Sovereign to whom he had sworn loyalty spoke in no uncertain tones, and Lincoln was overwhelmingly chosen by the votes of the People.

Morse was outvoted but not convinced, and I shall make but one quotation from a letter of November 9, to his brother Richard, who had also remained firm in spite of his brother’s pleading:  “My consolation is in looking up, and I pray you may be so enlightened that you may be delivered from the delusions which have ensnared you, and from the judgments which I cannot but feel are in store for this section of the country.  When I can believe that my Bible reads ‘cursed’ instead of ‘blessed’ are the ‘peacemakers,’ I also shall cease to be a peace man.  But while they remain, as they do, in the category of those that are blessed, I cannot be frightened at the names of ‘copperhead’ and ‘traitor’ so lavishly bestowed, with threats of hanging etc., by those whom you have assisted into power.”

In a letter of Mr. George Wood’s, of June 26, 1865, I find the following sentences:  “I have to acknowledge your very carefully written letter on the divine origin of Slavery....  I hope you have kept a copy of this letter, for the time will come when you will have a biography written, and the defense you have made of your position, taken in your pamphlet, is unquestionably far better than he (your biographer) will make for you.”

The letter to which Mr. Wood refers was begun on March 5, 1865, but finished some time afterwards.  It is very long, too long to be included here, but in justice to myself, that future biographer, I wish to state that I have already given the main arguments brought forward in that letter, in quotations from previous letters, and that I have attempted no defense further than to emphasize the fact that, right or wrong, Morse was intensely sincere, and that he had the courage of his opinions.

Returning to an earlier date, and turning from matters political to the gentler arts of peace, we find that the one-time artist had always hoped that some day he could resume his brush, which the labors incident to the invention of the telegraph had compelled him to drop.  But it seems that his hand, through long disuse, had lost its cunning.  He bewails the fact in a letter of January 20, 1864, to N. Jocelyn, Esq.:—­

“I have many yearnings towards painting and sculpture, but that rigid faculty called reason, so opposed often to imagination, reads me a lecture to which I am compelled to bow.  To explain:  I made the attempt to draw a short time ago; everything in the drawing seemed properly proportioned, but, upon putting it in another light, I perceived that every perpendicular line was awry.  In other words I found that I could place no confidence in my eyes.