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

~electtone from ber Wrtttnoo
happiness is floating on a cloud with the one we love. Dreamy
enough, yet I could not give a better definition of happiness.
There must be moments in love that would atone for a life of
misery,-that first consciousness of its presence when
We feel that we adore,
To such refined excess,
That though the heart would break with more,
It could not live with less.
To feel this must be to feel the concentrated poetry of existence. In the desert of life, love is the oasis that we pine to
reach - that reaching, we weep to part from, and to which we
still turn back with longing, lingering look.
As the time approaches for me to leave this place, I grow so
impatient that it seems to me the next fortnight will never pass.
How two years of solitude and study have changed me! How
gay I was once! How subdued and sedate I am now! Those
that have known me before will scarcely recognize me now. In
thinking over the list of my early friends, how many have gone
to their last repose! -only a few weeks since, H, among
others. She was my earliest friend. How many giddy hours I
have frolicked away with her!-yet the last time we met, how
cold was our meeting, how tearless our parting! We had grown
strangers.
April7tb. To-morrow I shall leave this "abomination of
desolation" forever. It will cost me some pain to do so, notwithstanding it has scarcely afforded me a happy moment for the
last two years that I have vegetated here. Perhaps I shall be like
the old prisoner released from the Bastile, who went back and
begged to die there.
This is the last page of my journal: I close this and my exile
together.
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