If Mrs. Botta found more in society than most persons do, it
     was because she carried more there.

Horace Greeley once said to me, “Anne Lynch is the best woman that God ever made.”

Few women known to me have had greater grace or ease in the entertainment of strangers, while in her more private intercourse, her frank, intelligent, courteous ways won her the warmest and most desirable friendships.

The position of the Bottas in the literary and artistic world enabled them to draw together not only the best-known people of this country, but to a degree greater than any, as far as I know, the most distinguished visitors from abroad, beyond the ranks of mere title or fashion.  No home, I think, in all the land compared with theirs in the number and character of its foreign visitors.

I should like to introduce you to her home as it was—­the hall, with its interesting pictures and fragrant with fresh flowers; the dining-room, the drawing-rooms, with their magnetized atmosphere of the past (you can almost feel the presence of those who have loved to linger there); her own sanctum, where a chosen few were admitted; but the limits of space forbid.  The queens of Parisian salons have been praised and idealized till we are led to believe them unapproachable in their social altitude.  But I am not afraid to place beside them an American woman, uncrowned by extravagant adulation, but fully their equal—­the artist, poet, conversationist, Anne C. L. Botta.

She was absolutely free from egotism or conceit, always avoiding allusion to what she had accomplished, or her unfulfilled longings.  But she once told me: 

Sandy (short for old, red sand stone), I would rather have had a child than to have made the most perfect statue or the finest painting ever produced. [She also said]:  If I could only stop longing and aspiring for that which is not in my power to attain, but is only just near enough to keep me always running after it, like the donkey that followed an ear of corn which was tied fast to a stick.

Mrs. Botta came of a Celtic father, gay, humorous, full of impulsive chivalry and intense Irish patriotism, and of a practical New England mother, herself of Revolutionary stock, clear of judgment, careful of the household economy, upright, exemplary, and “facultied.”  In the daughter these inherited qualities blended in a most harmonious whole.  Grant Allen, the scientific writer, novelist, and student of spiritualistic phenomena, thinks that racial differences often combine to produce a genius.

I often think of that rarely endowed friend in full faith that she now has the joys denied her here, and that her many-sided nature is allowed progress, full and free and far, in many directions.  I am also sure that Heaven could not be Heaven to Mrs. Botta if she were not able to take soul flights and use wireless telegraphy to still help those she left behind, and hope that she can return to greet and guide us as we reach the unknown land.