1) The narrator has a conversation on a train with a male companion where they discuss various poets such as Byron, Keats, and Shelley. 2) The narrator mentions the unknown poet Gerard Manly Hopkins whose lines were quoted to her by a friend. 3) As the train continues on its journey, the narrator and her companion sit in thought, having engaged in a discussion of poetry.

1. In The Train, Part 3.
“Well”, drawled my compartment friend, clearly more relaxed now in the
self-assured comfort of his own superior male selection, “I would like to know your
own favourite poet…if I may?” (I know it seems so easy now, dear Reader, but I
assure you it was all done by Logic…the Logic of Human Personality and its new
Psychology). Do you think that in the near future a doctor of the human soul might
produce such a new and dynamic psychology? I should like to know of
him…probably from some distant place like Vienna, shrouded in Germanic
Romanticism, and their scientific-physiological Weltanschauung of…of… Helmholtz,
Wundt and Brucke, I think? I would certainly advise him to begin with dreams.
Mine are so….oh, so vivid, intense…personal. I could not possibly say more. It would
utterly ruin any five o’clock gathering for tea and buns.
“It is difficult to decide among so many” I taunted him, drawing out my easy
advantage to a full thirty seconds or more. He was hanging on my every
non-utterance, and his mouth began to gape ever so slightly. I could not bear to torture
him more, he was so genuine in unconsciously showing me his vulnerability.
“I was brought up on Lord Byron, Keats and Shelley” I hastened to reassure him.
“So much Romantic ‘wildness’, self-wrought pain and wounded ecstasy, delivered in
a cornucopia of flowing verses and towering, love-drenched phrases! But I have this
friend…Sybil is her name, what a darling girl she is…and she quoted me some lines
she had been shown by her friend, the writer Robert Bridges - Eton and Oxford, you
know. It was not Mr. Bridges’s own work, you see, but by an unknown hand…I
believe his name was Gerard Manly… something or other. A Jesuit, I believe, who
sadly passed away only last year. Such extraordinary lines he captures, of Nature
‘never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things’; and the darker side
of our supposed civilization, where ‘all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with
toil’. Do you not feel for him? ‘O the mind’ he says, ‘the mind has mountains; cliffs
of fall/ Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed’, whilst we…why, we are ‘No worst, there
is none. Pitched past pitch of grief, More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder
wring!’ Is not that just…oh! Too much?”
I stared blankly for a moment, in the direction of my railway-companion, lost but
not foundering in the mixed pathos and deliciousness of my vanishing reverie. I need
not have worried however. The beaming face beneath the well-groomed hair told me
all I needed to know of its owner’s response to my outburst. For a long while we sat
together in waning thought, as the Great Western’s locomotive thundered towards our
next stop, and the necessary descent to a new platform for a further connection [sic].
Glossary & Notes: [sic], Latin ‘thus’ or ‘’so’, classically used in phrases such as
‘sic transit gloria mundi’ = thus passes the glory of the world,
Thomas a Kempis, 1426. More modern authors/editors employ [sic] to draw attention
to (a) words possibly misspelt or doubtful in quotation; (b) as here, to suggest a
potential double-meaning/interference from, requiring extra vigilance by the Reader.
In Dr. Ray Dyer’s edited-fully annotated Lady Muriel, The Victorian Romance, many
of Lewis Carroll’s word choices etc are flagged-up with [sic], where fuller annotation
was not felt to be necessary/space available, or where it is left to the alerted Reader to
enter into the spirit of literary detective.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1844-1889, Balliol Oxford Classics scholar, influenced by
Pater and Newman, was of course the poet alluded to above - Manly [sic] - who

2. published virtually nothing in his short life. His friend Robert Bridges, 1844-1930,
received the then extraordinary outpourings via long letters; remained busy with his
own work and the Society For Pure English; became Poet Laureate in 1913, and
during/after the interregnum of the Great War, finally presented the work of Hopkins
to an unsuspecting world in 1918. Dodgson-Carroll nowhere indicates familiarity with
Bridges or his works, though the Milton’s Prosody, 1893, could conceivably have
been noted. Dodgson was of course well-versed in Classics, and Romantic Poetry, and
also advocated ‘Purer’ English, in his case exampled by the works of ‘earlier’ authors
such as Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott. Curiously, a late child-friend of his at
Oxford, Ruth Gamlen, 1882-1964, in 1907 married a brother-in-law of Robert
Bridges, as noted by Morton Cohen in his excellent Letters of Lewis Carroll, Vol. II,
905n2.
I must thank my husband, Ray, who unflinchingly provides assistance with these
Notes. His books are indeed ‘cornucopias’ of directed information, and it is his deep
interest in Freud and the Viennese and London School of Psychoanalytic Personality
Studies which has helped me to liberate my own ‘dream enigmas’. His doctoral study
of child analyst Anna Freud is still available after more than thirty years: Her Father’s
Daughter. The Work of Anna Freud. Raymond Dyer, PhD, 1983. New York &
London, Jason Aronson Inc. pp. 323, with full Bibliographies and Index. His work
was well-received by Viennese Americans such as Erik Erikson, Marianne Kris, Anny
Katan, Anna Maenchen and Edith Buxbaum, all of whom corresponded with him,
whilst recent authorities who continue to cite his study include Dr. Clifford Yorke,
Rose Edgecumbe, and Nick Midgely, 2012, of the Anna Freud Centre, London.