Page:Collingwood - Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll.djvu/103

 an effect produced on the thin white clouds by the moon shining through, which I had not noticed—a ring of 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 had taken of Miss Alice Liddell as a beggar-child, and which Tennyson said was the most beautiful photograph he had ever seen.

Tennyson told us he had often dreamed long passages of poetry, and believed them to be good at the time, though he ould 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—which, as an unpublished fragment of the Poet Laureate, may be thought interesting, but not affording much promise of his after powers.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