f golden
light at some distance off the moon, with an interval of
white between--this, he says, he has alluded to in one of
his early poems ("Margaret," vol. i.), "the tender amber." I
asked his opinion of Sydney Dobell--he agrees with me in
liking "Grass from the Battlefield," and thinks him a writer
of genius and imagination, but extravagant.

On another occasion he showed the poet a photograph which he had taken
of Miss Alice Liddell as a beggar-child, and which Tennyson said was
the most beautiful photograph he had ever seen.

[Illustration: Alice Liddell as Beggar-child. _From a
photograph by Lewis Carroll_.]

Tennyson told us he had often dreamed long passages of
poetry, and believed them to be good at the time, though he
could never remember them after waking, except four lines
which he dreamed at ten years old:--

May a cock sparrow
Write to a barrow?
I hope you'll excuse
My infantile muse;

--which, as an unpublished fragment of the Poet Laureate,
may be thought interesting, but not affording much promise
of his after powers.

He also told us he once dreamed an enormously long poem
about fairies, which began with very long lines that
gradually got shorter, and ended with fifty or sixty lines
of two syllables each!

On October 17, 1859, the Prince of Wales came into residence at Christ
Church. The Dean met him at the station, and all the dons assembled in
Tom Quadrangle to welcome him. Mr. Dodgson, as usual, had an eye to a
photograph, in which hope, however, he was doomed to disappointment.
His Royal Highness was tired of having his picture taken.

During his early college life he used often to spend a few days at
Hastings, with his mother's sisters, the Misses Lutwidge. In a letter
written from their house to his sister Mary, and dated April 11, 1860,
he gives an account of a lecture he had just heard:--

I am just returned from a series of dissolving views on the
Arctic regions, and, while the information there received is
still fresh in my mind, I will try to give you some of it.
In the first place, you may not know that one of the objects
of the Arctic expeditions was to discover "the intensity of
the magnetic needle." He [the lecturer] did not tell us,
however, whether they had succeeded in discovering it, or
whether that rather obscure question is still doubtful. One