CHAPTER XIV.
BUFFALO (Continued.)
Letters from John E. Robinson and Welcome Whittaker.
During the progress of all this, our Buffalo Campaign, it is scarcely worth while to say that I received no end of letters of sympathy and encouragement. The number must have counted by thousands who had by this time witnessed for themselves, not merely the comparatively small sounds of the ordinary rapping near our persons, but sometimes great knockings, as by powerful arms and heavy hammers, on all parts of rooms and even outside of them; together with ringing of bells, moving and lifting of tables, etc.; to say nothing of the intelligent communications which identified their Spirit friends, etc. All such persons therefore knew that the Buffalo doctoral theory of knee-joints was impossible and absurd, and felt no uneasiness about the result of any real investigations. But many of them naturally sympathized with us under the harassing annoyance in which we were placed by the promulgation of even such a ridiculous theory, under such high-sounding “scientific” authority.
From these letters I select the following.
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.’