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. L. cotta
... I am sure it would not be well for us to have
everything we want. Life would be too pleasant,
and we should not be willing to leave it when our
summons comes. We have just now been speculating as to when you will come, but are lost in
conjecture.
.. I know that danger and death are at our
sides every moment of our lives, and you know my
unwavering conviction, that an inscrutable series of
cause and effect constitutes all the phenomena of the
world; so that there can be no accident, no occurrence, in the universe, except such as was designed
to take place from all eternity. All that remains for
us to do, then, is to launch ourselves on this great
sea of being-to strike out for the great landmarks
we wish to reach, and in our feeble way struggle
toward them, well knowing that the great currents
will bear us along: perhaps to our proposed ends,
perhaps to absorb us in its own essence.
...I look off on the ocean and think of it as the
emblem of that great unknown and untraversed sea
that we must all launch our boats on, sooner or later.
But it would be a very pleasant thought if we knew
that before doing this one might live out one's idea
of life. Mine is, and always has been, so distinct
and so unlike the actual life, and so different from
that of most other persons. I have always felt like
those eagles which have been hatched in Central
Park. They hop from one perch to another in those
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