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. 3. otta
Schiller. It is traitorous to our own hearts, when we alone have
witnessed their agonies and known their indefinable desires, thus
to turn the world's evidence, and join in the smile at their vain
aspirations and fruitless struggles, and betray their weaknesses.
No, my poor heart! never again will I jest with thy delusions or
the tears it has cost thee to part with them. Little indeed hast
thou found of sympathy or love in the world; and now that thou
wouldst cast away the mantle of the Ideal as unfit for the blasts
and frosts thou must encounter, and wouldst gird on thy shrinking form the protecting armor of Philosophy, though thou totterest with its weight, I would not bereave thee of thy last
stronghold, the sympathy of thyself.
2d. I quite like journalizing. It will be company for me, and
this is what I most need. To be thus "the cannibal of one's
own thoughts " is horrible. To move among our fellow-beings,
wrapt in ourselves, invisible, scanning the actions, compassing
the petty motives, too often detecting other qualities than virtue:
this drives us back upon ourselves, and teaches that
There is no bond that mocks at Fate
Like man's with his own heart.
Moore says, in his "Life of Sheridan," that the knowledge we
acquire in maturity and from inclination, in contradistinction to
that received through the medium of the birch, has about it a
freshness the latter can never possess. This is my daily experience. Knowledge breaks upon me now like light upon the
restored vision of the blind. I thank Fortune that I was such a
paragon of idleness in my childhood. I am far from being free
from it yet, however, though it is quite time. Twenty years of
a life is sufficient for hibernation.
I am really pleased with this new acquaintance- myself. She
is more companionable than I thought she would be, after being
neglected for a lifetime. Not that I have had no thoughts, but
they were shadowy from not being expressed in language. Why,
then, have I never written before? I believe it is because life has
seemed of too little importance to record even a feeling of its
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