Source: Sylvie and Bruno (dedication)
The dream-gleam-stream rhyme which reappears here again Carroll probably borrowed from a poem he read about 1850, see the published diaries for a letter from March 15, 1886 to Mr. Watson. A quite well-known poem with a stream-dream rhyme (also referring to “time”) is Isaac Watts’ paraphrase of Psalm 90, originally published in The Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament. So it might be that either Carroll read this and remembered wrongly about “gleam”, or he read a poem inspired by Watts’ poem.
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.