Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [20]
Lucretia was seventeen, Finley twenty-five. Her youth appealed to him for its beguiling combination of modesty and frankness. And beauty. Her friends spoke admiringly of her delicately pretty features—rosy cheeks, slightly upturned nose, overflowing masses of dark curled hair. Altogether he counted Lucrece, as he called her, a special gift of Providence: “Never, never was a human being so blest as I am.”
In fact, Finley was swooningly in love. Arriving alone at another of his itinerant stopovers, he recollected in tearful detail a walk with Lucrece, their conversation in a garden, a parting kiss. He confessed to her his yearning: “As I write, the moon shines on my paper, as if to remind me that last night at this hour it shone on both of us to-gether; Oh, when, dear Lucrece, shall I again see you? When shall the moon shine again on both of us together?” He asked her to look at the moon for half an hour on Sunday evening, beginning precisely at eight o’clock. Precisely at eight o’clock he would look at the moon for half an hour, too, and think of her. When on the road, he poured out letters to her; when back in Charlestown he sometimes walked to Boston early in the morning to get her replies.
Considering that he had recently parted with Jennette, Finley realized that his parents might accuse him of haste in his engagement as in much else, thinking him “a terrible harum-scarum fellow.” Despite his many complaints about their attempts to control his life, he consulted them about his marriage plans often. They advised him to go slowly. Elizabeth stressed the “absolute necessity” of his becoming financially independent before settling down: “Remember it takes a great many hundred dollars to make and to keep the pot a-boiling.” She also had her own ideas about the characteristics of a good wife, including common sense, a decent dowry, and domestic skills—“a slutt is a terrible trial to a man.” In addition, it helped, she said, if “you love each other better than all the world beside.”
One thing about Lucrece troubled Finley: her religious life. Her father was unreligious; her younger brother, a Harvard student, was infected with the school’s Unitarianism; and her many friends were “all of the gay kind,” given to waltzing. She herself was surely open to genuine piety, but she had no adequate idea of it: “She seems willing to know the truth, but I fear she has not yet experienced a true change of heart. She believes in the truth of the gospel, but I fear it is only a speculative belief.”
As Finley’s qualms suggest, his nights at Covent Garden left his religious being unchanged. Spiritually he remained the adolescent who summarized the lives of Protestant martyrs, a descendant of the Calvinist-Congregationalist piety of New England that stretched back 150 years from Jedediah Morse to Jonathan Edwards to Increase Mather. And with his return to America and to his family he had been experiencing signs of conversion, “serious impressions,” Jedediah called them, marks of a “lively Christian.” Jedediah had undergone conversion at around the age of twenty—“a secret, inexpressible Pleasure arising in my Breast,” as he described the process at the time, “with a certain awe & reverence, of God.” To feel such a powerful change of heart, receive such an influx of divine grace, had been his parents’ fondest hope for Finley since the day of his birth.
While undergoing his own arduous conversion, Finley ministered as well to Lucrece’s “unrenewed heart.” In one way he felt uncomfortable presuming to lead her to experiential knowledge of the love of God. One might