Single-stanza excerpt from "Four Riddles", no. I; namely, the third of 15 four-line stanzas:
Yet what are all such gaieties to me
Whose thoughts are full of indices and surds?
x2 + 7x + 53 = 11/3
"Four Riddles" was first published in Rhyme? and Reason? (1883), when No. I alone had been previously published.
No. I is "a specimen of what might be done by making the Double Acrostic a connected poem instead of what it has hitherto been, a string of disjointed stanzas, on every conceivable subject, and about as interesting to read straight through as a page of a Cyclopædia."
-- Introductory note to "Four Riddles", viewed in Project Gutenberg Ebook #651, a transcript of Phantasmagoria and Other Poems (1911); namely, pp. 152ff
