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..:3otta
forget the glowing earnestness of her final words.
"I do not think," said my hostess, "that the province of poetry is so much to idealize the real, as to
help us to realize our ideals, and to make actual our
highest spiritual conceptions."
Now, this desire to "help us to realize our ideals"
informs every line of the true-hearted verse left us by
Mrs. Botta. Regarding this bequest, an expression
made by the present writer more than ten years since
recurs now with an emphasized force of belief on her
part.
"In these days of advanced estheticism, often
with a sickly Erato as presiding muse, it is with a
sense of relief and refreshment that we turn to the
so-called old-fashioned school of poetry, more than
ever disposed to set a high premium upon explicit
motive, normal emotions, a sweet and sound morality, and good' common sense,' in verse as well as in
other departments of literature. In the volume of
poems by Anne C. L. Botta, we meet with no
obscurity of treatment, no ethical ambiguity; all are
characterized by a winning purity and serenity of
feeling, and by a lucid grace of expression."
Of her work she was wont to say in smiling deprecation, "It may not be poetry- but it is myself." In the fullest sense of the injunction she
looked into her heart and wrote. And nowhere is the
record of that heart's most warm, most vital and
indomitable pulsations more clearly expressed than in
her sonnets, from the first to the very last, which appeared in "The Century Magazine" shortly after her
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