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614 controlling minds of Wisconsin in all matters of public polity. He was at one time Secretary of State. Mrs. Robinson was as famous for political wisdom as her husband. Of her newspaper career

it is somewhat difficult to write, since her public work was so closely interwoven with her private experiences during the very sorrowful and troublous period of her connection with the "Advocate." She went into the office of that paper by the usual route, the desire to help her husband, in the early part of 1882, as Colonel Robinson's health was failing rapidly. Gradually the sick man's duties fell to his devoted wife, and before long she assumed charge of them all, taking the place in the office while she performed her own duties at home, doubly increased by the care of a dying husband. Her lot was rendered infinitely harder by other troubles, which harassed and hampered her almost beyond endurance. After three years of editorial management of the "Advocate, she was placed in a position to assume control of the whole establishment connected with the paper, including not only the business management, but also a job department, a bindery and store. That position she held for four years, during which time Colonel Robinson died. Then came the inevitable result, nervous prostration, an attempt again to take up the work, then her final retirement from the paper in 1888. Under all these trying conditions she won for herself an enviable reputation as a woman of much force and ability, always animated by the highest, purest motives, and as an easy, graceful, cultured writer. She was also a good deal of a politician, with original Republican tendencies, though the "Advocate" was and is a Democratic paper. The story of her having brought out a Republican issue of the paper, when it was once put under her charge during Colonel Robinson's editorship, is a standard joke, and is periodically repeated in the State papers. The stand taken by the "Advocate" during the labor strikes and riots in Milwaukee, in 1881, is said to have saved the Democratic party in Wisconsin from making a serious mistake.

ROBINSON, Miss Fannie Ruth, author and educator, born in Carbondale, Pa., 30th September, 1847. In 1859 her parents took up their residence in Albany, N. Y., and there the formative years of her life were passed.

She was graduated at the age of seventeen years from the Albany Female Academy, and later received the degree of A. M. from Rutgers' College, New York. Among the influences which quickened her early ambitions, she recognizes three: First, the impulses received from a small circle of men and women, some of whom were very much older than herself; second, the impetus given to youthful ambitions by a class of young people in the alumnae of the female academy, and third, the lift into a rarer air which was hers, happily through many seasons, when Emerson and Phillips, Curtis and Beecher, Chapin and Holmes went to the capital city at the bidding of the Lyceum. She began to write early. Most of her published poems appeared in "Harper's Magazine" in the years between 1870 and 1880, during which time she wrote occasionally for the "Contributor's Club" of the "Atlantic Monthly." Her poem, "A Quaker's Christmas Eve," was copied in almost every city in the Union. Albany twice paid her the honor of asking for her verse, once for the services of the first Decoration Day, and again when an ode was to be written for the ceremony of laying the corner-stone of the capitol. In 1879 she began to teach, and since then she has written little for publication. A poem on Emerson, published after his death in the "Journal of Philosophy," is considered one of her best. Two of her sonnets found place in the collection of "Representative American Sonnets," made in 1890 by Mr. Crandall.