"'Yes, sir,' I said, 'I perceive it is the portrait of the king.'
"'Well,' said Mr. West, 'the king was sitting to me for that portrait when the box containing the American Declaration of Independence was handed to him.'
"'Indeed,' I answered; 'and what appeared to be the emotions of the king? What did he say?'
"'His reply,' said Mr. West, 'was characteristic of the goodness of his heart: "If they can be happier under the government they have chosen than under me, I shall be happy."'"[11]
Morse returned to Boston in the autumn of 1815, and there set up a studio. But he was not too occupied in painting to turn a hand to invention, and we find him the next winter touring New Hampshire and Vermont trying to sell to towns and villages a fire-engine pump he had invented, while seeking commissions to paint portraits at fifteen dollars a head. It was that winter that he met in Concord, New Hampshire, Miss Lucretia P. Walker, whom he married in the autumn of 1818, and whose death in February, 1825, just after he had successfully fulfilled a liberal commission to paint General Lafayette, was the great blow of his young manhood.
The National Academy of Design Morse helped to found in New York in 1826, and of this institution he was first president. About the same time we find him renewing his early interest in electrical experiments. A few years later he is sailing for Europe, there to execute many copying commissions. And on his return from this stay abroad the idea of the telegraph suggested itself to him.
Of the exact way in which Morse first conceived the idea of making electricity the means of conveying intelligence, various accounts have been given, the one usually accepted being that while on board the packet-ship _Sully_, a fellow passenger related some experiments he had witnessed in Paris with the electro-magnet, a recital which made such an impression upon one of his auditors that he walked the deck the whole night. Professor Morse's own statement was that he gained his knowledge of the working of the electro-magnet while attending the lectures of Doctor J. Freeman Dana, then professor of chemistry in the University of New York, lectures which were delivered before the New York Atheneum.