In Looking Glass, Dodgson’s admiration of children, especially for Alice, can be heard within the first words of the book, which are written as a poem:

Child of the pure unclouded brow

And dreaming eyes of wonder!

Though time be fleet, and I and thou

Are half a life asunder,

Thy loving smile will surely hail

The love-gift of a fairy-tale.

In the last stanza, Dodgson’s sentiment is unmistakable:

And, though the shadow of a sigh

May tremble through the story,

For “happy summer days” gone by,

And vanish’d summer glory-

It shall not touch, with breath of bale,

The pleasance of our fairy-tale

Perhaps one of the most obvious passages dealing with both sentiment and time is within the Looking Glass chapter “Wool and Water,” when Alice and the Sheep are in the rowboat, and Alice has reached for the rushes:

What mattered it to her just then that the rushes had begun to fade, and lose all their scent and beauty, form the very moment that she picked them? Even real scented rushes, you know, last only a very little while –and these, being dream-rushes, melted away almost like snow, as they lay in heaps at her feet –but Alice hardly noticed this, there were so many other curious things to think about.

In the chapter “It’s My Own Invention,” Alice finally meets the White Knight, who is so very transparently Dodgson. This chapter is the most allegorical of Alice Liddell and Charles Dodgson’s personalities and relationship. The White Knight is portrayed as kindly, clumsy but well-intentioned, and eccentric. The most revealing passage Dodgson writes in Looking Glass is before the White Knight sings his song for Alice:

Of all the strange things that Alice saw in her journey Through The Looking-Glass, this was the one she always remembered most clearly. Years afterwards she could bring the whole scene back again, as if it had been only yesterday – the mild blue eyes and the kindly smile of the Knight – the setting sun gleaming through his hair, and shining on his armour in a blaze of light that quite dazzled her…. All this she took in like a picture, as, with one hand shading her eyes, she leant against a tree…. listening, in a half-dream to the melancholy music of the song.

But the most poignant lies after the song when the White Knight and Alice must part:

“You’ve only a few yards to go,” he said, “down the hill and over that little brook, and then you’ll be a Queen—But you’ll stay and see me off first?” he added as Alice turned with an eager look in the direction to which he pointed. “I sha’n’t be long. You’ll wait and wave your handkerchief when I get to that turn in the road? I think it’ll encourage me you see.”

“Of course I’ll wait,” said Alice: “and thank you very much for coming so far – and for the song – I liked it very much."

“I hope so,” the Knight said doubtfully: “but you didn’t cry so much as I thought you would.

[It] speaks to the bittersweet emotion of yesterday’s memory long past and irretrievable to the man who wants them desperately.... [However] she was not to be stopped, and the White Knight is simply a casualty of her magnetic presence. The parallel is striking, as Dodgson always knew that Alice would grow older, and that she would ultimately leave him behind for those things she had always been destined. He was, after all, just a childhood friend.