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

2 perfetct W.oman
speak; we all know of the long outdoor walks she
took, even up to the time of her death, and how she
always descended the stairs with a run.
The first thing one observed in her mind, it seems
to me, was its quick interest in the highest and
greatest things. The atmosphere of the true, the
beautiful, and the good was what she breathed; her
sympathy was wide,- she seemed ever to see the
universe and humanity, and to conceive of them as
wholes; a mind not learned nor laborious, yet truly
philosophic, in harmony with Plato and Emerson,
seeing the unity amid all variety. By this faculty she
conceived and executed the "Handbook of Universal
Literature," one of the most useful books in any
language. Literature is, simply and scientifically, the
soul of humanity; this truth she saw,-this soul
through that work she pictured whole and complete.
She had a horror of disjeaa membra. Universal history
as at present written, she said, is pieced up of the
head of one nation, the body of another, the limbs
of the next, and so on; and she had already planned
and begun to work out the same scheme for the
philosophic unity of history that she had achieved for
literature.
One might have known her for years, yet without
having read her poems. When this volume is opened
to such a one, it will be a revelation. Here she has
pictured her own soul, complete, frank; all its wishes,
all its aspirations, its loves, its longings, exactly what
she thinks and feels on all the highest and grandest
subjects, as well as those within the deepest and most
159