SAMUEL FINLEY BREESE MORSE. 



237 



Several years of struggle in Albany, New York, and other 

 places followed. During this period his inventive faculty 

 was not idle. He devised a machine for carving in marble 

 copies of any model, and was revolving other ideas in his 

 mind. In February, 1825, he was in Washington painting a 

 full-length portrait of Lafayette for the city of New York, 

 when his father wrote him that his beloved wife had died of a 

 heart disease on the yth of that month. She was only twenty- 

 five years of age, and there is abundant testimony that she 

 was a woman of great loveliness. But little more than a year 

 afterward Morse's father passed away. He was sixty-five 

 years of age, and had long been loved and honoured by a wide 

 circle. 



After his wife's death Morse had again repaired to New 

 York and made gradual progress with his brush. His broth- 

 ers had been there since 1823, had established the New York 

 Observer, and were steadily building it up. His three children 

 were now in the care of various relatives. Morse was one of 

 the leading spirits in establishing, during the winter of i825-'26, 

 the National Academy of Design, the prime object of which 

 was to provide art students the facilities that were then chur- 

 lishly denied them by the American Academy of Arts. He 

 was its first president, and was continued in the office until 

 1845, when he retired from it to give his attention to his tele- 

 graphic researches. 



In the early part of 1827 Morse attended a course of lec- 

 tures on electro-magnetism, delivered before the New York 

 Athenaeum, by Prof. James Freeman Dana, with whom he was 

 well acquainted. At these lectures experiments were shown to 

 illustrate the power of a straight wire carrying a current of 

 electricity to induce magnetism, and the increased effect of 

 such a wire bent into a ring, into a series of rings forming a 

 spiral, and into a flat spiral or volute. Prof. Dana died soon 

 after giving these lectures, and the subject apparently passed 

 out of Morse's thoughts for a time. 



Morse was now at thirty-six years of age a successful 

 artist. He had been honoured by his fellows with repeated 

 elections to the presidency of the National Academy, and had 

 made many warm friends among the wealthy and influential 

 citizens of the metropolis. But the determination to rise yet 

 higher was as strong as when he began his studies. He de- 



