206 SAMUEL FINLEY BEEESE MORSE. 



that she could hear of my arrival, and thinking of 

 thousands of accidents which may have befallen 

 me. I wish that in an instant I could communicate 

 the information / but three thousand miles are not 

 passed over in an instant, and we must wait 

 four long weeks before we can hear from each 

 other." 



On the outside of this letter, yellow with age, 

 he wrote toward the end of his life, " LONGING FOR 



A TELEGRAPH EVEN IN THIS LETTER.'^ 



In London he soon met Benjamin West, born in 

 Springfield, Penn., then at the head of the Royal 

 Academy in England. He had been poor and 

 obscure ; now he was distinguished, and courted 

 even by royalty. Morse, ever ambitious, soon ar- 

 ranged to study under West, and became his 

 devoted admirer. He wrote home : " Mr. West is 

 in his seventy-fourth year, but to see him you 

 would suppose him only about five-and-forty. . . . 

 He expressed great attachment to his native coun- 

 try, and he told me, as a proof of it, he presented 

 them with this large picture (' Christ Healing the 

 Sick'). I walked through his gallery of paintings of 

 his own production. There were upwards of two 

 hundred, consisting principally of the original 

 sketches of his large pieces. He has painted in 

 all upward of six hundred pictures, which is more 

 than any artist ever did. with the exception of 

 Rubens. Mr. West is so industrious now that it is 

 hard to get access to him, and then only between 

 the hours of nine and ten in the morning. He is 



