“I wonder what sort of condition the book is in that I lent you to take to America? (‘Laneton Parsonage,’ I mean). Very shabby, I expect. I find lent books never come back in good condition. However, I’ve got a second copy of this book, so you may keep it as your own. Love and kisses to any one you know who is lovely and kissable.—
“Always your loving Uncle,
“C. L. D.”
In 1876 appeared the long poem called the “Hunting of the Snark; or, An Agony in Eight Fits,” and besides those verses we have from Lewis Carroll’s pen two books called “Phantasmagoria” and “Rhyme and Reason.”
The last work of his that attained any great celebrity was “Sylvie and Bruno,” a curious romance, half fairy tale, half mathematical treatise. Mr. Dodgson was employed of late years on his “Symbolic Logic,” only one part of which has been published, and he seems to have been influenced by his studies. One can easily trace the trail of the logician in Sylvie and Bruno, and perhaps this resulted in a certain lack of “form.” However, some of the nonsense verses in this book were up to the highest level of the author’s achievement. Even as I write the verse comes to me—
“He thought he saw a kangaroo
Turning a coffee-mill;
He looked again, and found it was
A vegetable pill!
‘Were I to swallow you,’ he said,
‘I should be very ill’!”
The fascinating jingle stays in the memory when graver verse eludes all effort at recollection. I personally could repeat “The Walrus and the Carpenter” from beginning to end without hesitation, but I should find a difficulty in writing ten lines of “Hamlet” correctly.
At the beginning of “Sylvie and Bruno” is a little poem in three verses which forms an acrostic on my name. I quote it—
“Is all our life, then, but a dream,
Seen faintly in the golden gleam
Athwart Time’s dark resistless stream?
Bowed to the earth with bitter woe,
Or laughing at some raree-show,
We flutter idly to and fro.
Man’s little day in haste we spend,
And, from its merry noontide, send
No glance to meet the silent end.”
You see that if you take the first letter of each line, or if you take the first three letters of the first line of each verse, you get the name Isa Bowman.