Memoirs of Anne C.L. Botta,: written by her friends. With selections from her correspondence and from her writings in prose and poetry.

Rnne C..:otta
to all forms of beauty, whether pictorial, plastic, verbal, or musical,-supplied her, even in the loneliest retreat, with employments and satisfactions that
left no vacancy.
A character so meritorious, a culture so ripe, an
example so fully rounded, deserve to be embalmed
in praise. Could society be replenished with specimens of the type of personality, experience, and
manners she displayed, its gifted frequenters would
no longer have to complain of what the sensitive
Keats bewailed as "the inhuman dearth of noble
natures." She exerted not merely a pleasing, but
likewise an educational and uplifting influence on
those around her. And the privilege of admission to
her intimate friendship was a delight and an incentive
never to be forgotten by its sharers. New-York is
an enormous city, but to those who knew and loved
her, it is appreciably poorer since she left it.
And is this the end? Remains there not, deeply
hidden, some glorious sequel? Shall we never see
her any more whom to see was always so pure a
pleasure and so choice a benefit? It is a childish
shallowness to confound with the mystic substance
of her spirit the mere bodily dust which transparently
veiled her and has now been laid in the grave.
Spirits, impenetrably concealed from external observation, in this material state are known to others
only through their bodies and through signals sent
thence. But we are invincibly aware that our bodies
are merely the garments of our spirits. And we both
instinctively surmise and speculatively think that in
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