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

Selectiono from ler Irttingo
But I know this is wrong. I know that it is better to live. We
are endowed with beautiful sympathies and divine faculties: we
can love and pity; we can think and imagine, and paint those
imaginings in words and colors; we can perceive the harmony
and beauty of the world about us,-and is not this worth living
for? And on the arch that history builds over the gulf of the
past, we can wander back to remote antiquity and trace the nations of our kind while they sleep under the weight of centuries.
"What are our woes and sufferance?" What if the world is
unkind, our friends indifferent, and our affections water but the
desert? Nature is true. In the calmness of the sunshine, in the
terror of the storm, in the beauty of the insect and the flower,
in the mysteries of the stars, and in the action of her unchanging laws, does she not alike reveal herself beautiful to our gaze
and worthy of our contemplation? Then come those " beings
of the mind" that people the visions of the poet and minister
to those finer wants of our nature that reality overlooks. Then
there is the power of doing good to those around us. With
such objects before you, will you call life a burden when a
few brief years at most will deprive you of it? Let me then
lay aside this morbid sensibility, and pass at once from the
dreaming and sentimental girl to the active, resolute, and
high-souled woman, chastened and subdued by thought and
adversity.
To-day I finished the reign of Diocletian. Is it not strange
that history presents but two instances that I recollect, of men
wearied with the glitter of a throne voluntarily descending from
their elevation? When Maximian remonstrated, Diocletian replied: "You would not wonder if you could see my cabbages
grow."
Is it not a proof that we are low in the scale of being, this fact
that anything like greatness of mind, nobility, or generosity
strikes us as something so strange? The world gazes in as
much astonishment to see a man perform a really generous action as if he had suddenly mounted in the air on wings. It
must be a low state of existence when the beautiful, the holy,
and the elevated excite such emotions of novelty, rather than
that which is base, cowardly, and low. The latter surround us
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