Robert Robinson, Chesterton, [near Cambridge], to Mary Hays, [Gainsford Street], 16 June 1784.

  Chesterton  June 16th: 84. 

Dr Miss Hayes

       I am extremely sorry to hear you have been so ill. I pray God restore your health perfectly. What could induce you to suppose anything the matter when I had the pleasure of waiting on you at Gainsford Street? Give me leave to assure you, that you never gave me a moment’s pain in your life, but on the contrary frequent pleasure, and nothing in you is capable of giving pain to any person in the world. I hope you will perfectly recover your health, and the rather because the state of the body has a great influence on the animal spirits, and the mind. How close the union! How mysterious!

       Ho, I have no intention of seeing London at present. I question whether I shall ever see it again, I do not at present design it. A perpetual succession of rural employments engage all my time. From weeding barley, to haying, from hay to howing turnips, from that to harvest, and so on till our dissolution arrives, and then, O ecstatick thought! and then from all worldly employments to the presence of God! I snatch an hour, or steal a moment, and hover between religion and the world like a needle between two loadstones, then I shall be, I humbly hope, forever with the Lord.

      See now – Pray Sir, says Joe, get me the turnip seed. . . . And I must get it, and go for it, and go for it to the other house, for I cannot send the key, so for the present, peace, health, and every blessing be with good Miss Hayes, and all her family. I am Madam yr most obedt servt

                                    R. Robinson

My wife would send comps were she awake, but it is hardly four o’clock, and she, good woman will sleep till – but peace be with her!

No address page.

Text: Misc. MS. 2157, Pforzheimer Collection, New York Public Library; Christian Reformer 11 (September 1844), 817.