nt speech upon the floor of the House, was Robert C.
Winthrop of Massachusetts. No public man I have ever known impressed
me more favorably than did Mr. Winthrop. He had been the close
friend of Everett, Choate, Webster, and Clay. He was the last
survivor of as brilliant a coterie of party leaders and statesmen as
our country has ever known. On a visit he made to the House of
Representatives, of which he had many years before been the Speaker,
business was at once suspended, and the members from all parts
of the Great Hall gathered about him. In a letter to the Morse
Memorial meeting in Boston, Mr. Winthrop stated that he was present
in the Capitol while the first formal messages were passing along the
magic cords between Washington and Baltimore. He referred to the
declination read by Senator Wright in his presence, of the nomination
to the Vice-Presidency tendered him, and added:

"All this gave us the most vivid impression, not only that a new
kind of _wire-pulling_ had entered into politics, but that a
mysterious and marvellous power of the air had at length been
subdued and trained to the service of mankind."

It is an interesting fact in this connection, to note that the
little girl, Miss Ellsworth, who brought to Mr. Morse the joyful
tidings of the passage of the bill on that early May morning in
1843, was rewarded by being requested by the great inventor to
write the first message that ever passed over the wire. When
she selected,

"What hath God wrought,"

words to find utterance by all tongues--she builded better than
she knew, for in the words of Speaker Blaine:

"The little thread of wire placed as a timid experiment between
the national capital and a neighboring city grew, and lengthened, and
multiplied with almost the rapidity of the electric current that
darted along its iron nerves, until, within his own lifetime,
continent was bound to continent, hemisphere answered through
ocean's depths to hemisphere, and an encircled globe dashed forth his
eulogy in the unmatched eloquence of a grand achievement."

Words of praise, spoke by Dr. Prime, of the great inventor just
after he had passed from the world, to which he left such a heritage,
can never lose their interest:

"Morse in his coffin is a recollection never to fade. He lay like
an ancient prophet or sage such as the old masters painted for
Abraham, or Isaiah. His finely chiselled features, classical in
their mould and majestic in r