She had a gift of appreciation which I have never seen surpassed.
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.