Lewis Carroll (1832 – 1898)
British author, mathematician, Anglican clergyman, logician, and amateur photographer, more famous under the pen name Lewis Carroll.
Charles Dodgson, born a romantic and a rationalist, would have fitted more easily into the world of Voltaire and Goethe than into the one that received him.
There was once a young man of Oporta,
Who daily got shorter and shorter,
The reason he said
Was the hod on his head
Which was filled with the heaviest mortar.
Last night we owned, with looks forlorn,
"Too well the scholar knows
There is no rose without a thorn"
But peace is made! We sing, this morn,
"No thorn without a rose!"
Our Latin lesson is complete:
We've learned that Love is Bitter-Sweet!
I believe this thought, of the possibility of death if calmly realised, and steadily faced would be one of the best possible tests as to our going to any scene of amusement being right or wrong. If the thought of sudden death acquires, for you, a special horror when imagined as happening in a theatre, then be very sure the theatre is harmful for you, however harmless it may be for others; and that you are incurring a deadly peril in going. Be sure the safest rule is that we should not dare to live in any scene in which we dare not die.
But, once realise what the true object is in life that it is not pleasure, not knowledge, not even fame itself, 'that last infirmity of noble minds' but that it is the development of character, the rising to a higher, nobler, purer standard, the building-up of the perfect Man and then, so long as we feel that this is going on, and will (we trust) go on for evermore, death has for us no terror; it is not a shadow, but a light; not an end, but a beginning!
I mark this day with a white stone.
"That narrow window, I expect,
Serves but to let the dusk in - "
"But please," said I, "to recollect
'Twas fashioned by an architect
Who pinned his faith on Ruskin!"
In her eyes is the living Hght
Of a wanderer to earth
From a far celestial height:
Summers five are all the span
Summers five since Time began
To veil in mists of human night
A shining angel-birth.
No one who was not by nature a lover of logic, and an extreme precisian in the use of words and phrases, could have written the two "Alice" books.
Say, whence is the voice that, when anger is burning,
Bids the whirl of the tempest to cease?
That stirs the vexed soul with an aching a yearning
For the brotherly hand-grip of peace ?
"Our Second Experiment", the Professor announced, as Bruno returned to his place, still thoughtfully rubbing his elbows, "is the production of that seldom-seen-but-greatly-to-be-admired phenomenon, Black Light! You have seen White Light, Red Light, Green Light, and so on: but never, till this wonderful day, have any eyes but mine seen Black Light! This box", carefully lifting it upon the table, and covering it with a heap of blankets, "is quite full of it. The way I made it was this - I took a lighted candle into a dark cupboard and shut the door. Of course the cupboard was then full of Yellow Light. Then I took a bottle of Black ink, and poured it over the candle: and, to my delight, every atom of the Yellow Light turned Black! That was indeed the proudest moment of my life! Then I filled a box with it. And now - would anyone like to get under the blankets and see it?"
In his estimation, logic was a most important study for everyone. No pains were spared to make it clear and interesting to those who would but consent to learn of him.
So, to reward him for his run
(As it was baking hot,
And he was over twenty stone),
The King proceeded, half in fun,
To knight him on the spot.
Blow, blow your trumpets till they crack,
Ye little men of little souls!
And bid them huddle at your back -
Gold-sucking leeches, shoals on shoals!
The star that danced at Carroll's birth
In high exuberance of mirth
Is dancing yet.
Dodgsons stammer was a good deal under control and could be used defensively (to gain time), or rhetorically to enhance the effect of a story, when the point was near.
I wasn't asleep! said Bruno, in a deeply-injured tone. "When I shuts mine eyes, it's to show that I'm awake!"
Dodgson of course was a meticulous traveler. He packed each article separately, well wrapped in paper to twice its bulk.
"What may I do?" at length I cried,
Tired of the painful task.
The fairy quietly replied,
And said "You must not ask."
I do not know if 'Alice in Wonderland' was an original story I was, at least, no conscious imitator in writing it but I do know that, since it came out, something like a dozen story-books have appeared, on identically the same pattern. The path I timidly explored believing myself to be 'the first that ever burst into that silent sea' is now a beaten high-road: all the way-side flowers have long ago been trampled into the dust: and it would be courting disaster for me to attempt that style again.
He thought he saw a Banker's Clerk
Descending from the bus:
He looked again, and found it was
A Hippopotamus:
'If this should stay to dine,' he said,
'There won't be much for us!'