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

3nne C. L. motta
within it the principle of life, of which you cannot
predicate non-existence. You cannot say of it: "It
hath been, or is about to be, or will be hereafter."
It is a principle without birth, hence without death;
but subject to change in its combination with matter.
Matter is the true river of Lethe; immersed in it, the
soul forgets much, but not everything; hence these
casual gleams of memory, giving us sudden, abrupt,
and momentary revelations of the past, are precisely
the phenomena we would expect to meet with.
These psychological facts seemed to her to warrant
the belief in the preexistence of the soul, which is
preeminent in the Hindoo theology, in Plato's philosophy, and in the writings of the early fathers of
the Church. Suddenly a thought is flashed into the
mind, which is not only isolated in the present, but
which cannot be traced back to any source in our
brief experience on this side of life; we perceive an
object, hear of some life, feel the touch of some fine
spirit, and immediately we seem to be lifted out of
the every-day circle of thoughts and feelings and
plunged into a sort of vague reminiscence of some
half-forgotten dream. This is one of the arguments
of the "Phado"; it is the prevailing idea of Wordsworth in his ode on the "Intimations of Immortality
from Recollections of Childhood"; the joy felt in the
grandeur of the sky, in the height of the mountain,
in the majesty of the forest, in the murmuring of the
brook, in the splendor of the grass, in the glory of
the flower, and in all the wondrous beauties of this
world, was to him, with his poetic nature, not only
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