Page:Complete Works of Lewis Carroll.djvu/29

Rh airy touch of a little child's pure lips, one seems to come somewhere near to this."

The discrepancy between that solemn dedication and the irresponsible laughter of the book it referred to would, I fear, arouse the most animated curiosity in the clinic of a Dr. Edward Hiram Reede or the library of a Lytton Strachey. They can be pardoned an acute interest in the inner springs of any fellow man who has fallen into thinking of all life as a process of contamination and who, as Newman said of young Hurrell Froude at Oxford, has "a high, severe idea of the intrinsic excellence of virginity." But those of us whose own memories of childhood are inextricably interwoven with all the gay tapestry of Alice in Wonderland would rather leave unexplored the shy, retreating man who left so much bubbling laughter in his legacy to the world.

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