“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.

“Had he never thought of the telegraph he would still receive, in death, the highest honors friendship and admiration can offer to distinguished and varied abilities, associated with a noble character.  In early life he showed the genius of a truly great artist.  In after years he exercised all the powers of a masterly scientific investigator.  Throughout his career he was eminent for the loftiness of his aims, for his resolute faith in the strength of truth, for his capacity to endure and to wait; and for his fidelity alike to his convictions and to his friends.

“His intellectual eminence was limited to no one branch of human effort, but, in the judgment of men who knew him best, he had endowments which might have made him, had he not been the chief of inventors, the most powerful of advocates, the boldest and most effective of artists, the most discerning of scientific physicians, or an administrative officer worthy of the highest place and of the best days in American history.”