From Lewis Carroll, quoted in Robin Wilson’s delightful Lewis Carroll in Numberland: His Fantastical Mathematical Logical Life :

From his shoulder Hiawatha
Took the camera of rosewood,
Made of sliding, folding rosewood;
Neatly put it all together.
In its case it lay compactly,
Folded into nearly nothing;

But he opened out the hinges,
Pushed and pulled the joints and hinges,
Till it looked all squares and oblongs,
Like a complicated figure
In the Second Book of Euclid.

This he perched upon a tripod -

Crouched beneath its dusky cover -
Stretched his hand, enforcing silence -
Said, “Be motionless, I beg you!”
Mystic, awful was the process.

All the family in order
Sat before him for their pictures:
Each in turn, as he was taken,
Volunteered his own suggestions,
His ingenious suggestions.

First the Governor, the Father:
He suggested velvet curtains
Looped about a massy pillar;
And the corner of a table,
Of a rosewood dining-table.
He would hold a scroll of something,
Hold it firmly in his left-hand;
He would keep his right-hand buried
(Like Napoleon) in his waistcoat;
He would contemplate the distance
With a look of pensive meaning,
As of ducks that die ill tempests.

Grand, heroic was the notion:
Yet the picture failed entirely:
Failed, because he moved a little,
Moved, because he couldn’t help it . . . .

And this, from Carroll/Dodgson’s reflections on the Pythagorean theorem: It is “as dazzlingly beautiful now as it was in the day when Pythagoras first discovered it, and celebrated its advent, it is said, by sacrificing a hecatomb of oxen - a method of doing honour to Science that has always seems to me slightly exaggerated and uncalled-for.  One can imagine oneself, even in these degenerate days, marking the epoch of some brilliant scientific discovery by inviting a convivial friend or two, to join one in a beefsteak and a bottle of wine.  But a hecatomb of oxen!  It would produce a quite inconvenient supply of beef.”

And these mock-Euclidian groaners from his satirical political tract,  The Dynamics of a Parti-cle : “Plain anger is the inclination of two voters to one another, who meet together, but whose views are not in the same direction.”  And “obtuse anger is that which is greater than right anger.”  And this postulate: “a controversy may be raised about any question, and at any distance from that question.”