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

anne C. X. Botta
cause it was so simple. Perhaps the Celtic blood in
her veins gave her her unflagging youth and grace;
perhaps it gave her that chivalrous spirit which led
her to espouse the cause of the weak, of the struggling
man, or country, or idea. She was the daughter of
a gallant young Irish gentleman who spent the four
years of his life from sixteen to twenty in a political
prison, and, coming afterward to Vermont, married
a clear-sighted, self-poised, energetic New England
girl. The child of this union inherited the poetry,
the imagination, and the ardor of one parent, singularly balanced by the good judgment and energy
and " faculty" of the other. She was sent to the
best schools,'and excelled in her studies, and loved
books, and wrote verses. But she also darned stockings beautifully, and knew how to make the very
most of every opportunity of culture and experience, and had the rarest common sense. She was
still a very young woman when she made New-York
her home, but she was already known as a poet,
story-writer, and essayist. So long as she lived she
was a student, an insatiable reader of the best things,
and a talker in whose vivid speech these garnered
ideas put on new values. She was full of artistic
instincts also, that made her whole house lovely.
She had a great talent for sculpture, doing work so
beautiful that, had not her special bent been literary,
she would have made a name in art.
But with all her accomplishments, her true genius
was moral. Life was the material with which she
wrought. With a deep seriousness of nature, she
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