LETTER FROM JOHN E. ROBINSON. ROCHESTER, February 26, 1851. "DEAR LEAH: "I received this evening your note (of rather diminutive proportions), written day before yesterday. Having been on the lookout for a letter for several days, it was very acceptable. It is written in a hopeful and encouraging vein, and, so far as what is expressed relates to myself, I can take no exceptions to its language. I should think it dictated in some intervening hour of quiet; one of the few which pass above and tranquillize for the time the unresting surface of your daily life. Such hours, let them be passed when they may, come and go with all of us; and the dial finger that marks their exit, registers also the blessings which they leave upon the heart. Impulsive as you are; accustomed as you are to excitement, and possessing (as you do) a woman's fondness for the glare of the world's gilded exterior; there is a part of your nature better than the rest, which would often shut out from the chamber of its occupancy those noisy and obtrusive influences which corrode its brightness and rob it of its rest. "That is the part of your being (the Leah) whom I would oftenest wish to have audience with; and in such hours as I speak of I would consider it a luxury equal to 'Wenham ice' in the torrid zone, or a shower of vertical sunbeams on an Arctic traveller--to _knock_ at the door of that inner chamber, and finding entrance, to sit down at the table of your heart and commune with you face to face. I have turned down the leaves in my memory whereon the records of such brief communings have been made, and it is no small pleasure to refer to them, as I often do, during these days of denial. So seldom it is now-a-days when the Spirit I would talk to answers my signal with the words 'at home.' "We (your friends here) want you _and the Spirits_--who seem to think their bread-and-butter depends on their paying court (in especial) to you and yours--to come to us once in a while--like the chance sunlight that struggles through the bars of the prisoner's window to reveal the gladness of the upper world--and rub the rust from our chains. "You ought to come home next week, at any rate, even if you are determined on going West again. And really, I think you ought to visit Cleveland and Cincinnati before long. You would find many good people in both places, who would rejoice to see you and Margaretta, and who are looking out for your advent there with no little anxiety.