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I heard the well-known British bugle; I saw the familiar scarlet of our troops; the voices which vociferated were English; the physiognomies had the Anglo-Saxon cast and complexion; and on the shores of the western hemisphere I felt myself at home.
If the physiognomies of his companions offered more or less analogy to that of the tiger, the vulture, or the fox, the form of his retreating forehead, and his bony, lank, and protruding jaws, supported by a neck of immense length, resembled entirely the conformation of a serpent's head.
Why have none of our painters ever attempted to reproduce the physiognomies of a swarm of Parisians, grouped, under stress of weather, in the damp porte-cochere of a building?
There was of course anciently no question for us of the drama at its best; and indeed while I lately by chance looked over a copious collection of theatrical portraits, beginning with the earliest age of lithography and photography as so applied, and documentary in the highest degree on the personalities, as we nowadays say, of the old American stage, stupefaction grew sharp in me and scepticism triumphed, so vulgar, so barbarous, seemed the array of types, so extraordinarily provincial the note of every figure, so less than scant the claim of such physiognomies and such reputations.
Presently I heard unintelligible words uttered in a nasal tone; and I beheld two Chinese, whose Asiatic physiognomies were not to be mistaken, even had their costume not betrayed their origin. They were addressing me in the language and with the salutations of their country. I rose and drew back a couple of steps.
Unexpected physiognomies will uncover themselves at these times in well- known faces; the aspect becomes invested with the spectral presence of entombed and forgotten ancestors; and family lineaments of special or exclusive cast, which in ordinary moments are masked by a stereotyped expression and mien, start up with crude insistence to the view.
Around these three subjects of thought his fancy busied itself, striving to fabricate some theory which would solve the enigmas which his reason everywhere met, some belief which would relieve him from the haunting horror of the unknown. Hence arose three great cycles of myths, which recur with strangely similar physiognomies in all continents and among all races.
This tied him with invisible shackles, thus checking his words and his thoughts. At last he went so far, that the line of various physiognomies, stretched out by the table opposite him, seemed to him a long and wavy white strip besprinkled with laughing eyes, and all these eyes were pricking him unpleasantly and painfully.
It scarcely seemed that it could have been by chance that the gray eagle stood stuffed in the corner; for the observer just as naturally detected the eagle in that human face, as he could ever have detected either of the others named, in different physiognomies, and the dead bird seemed the totem of the living man.
Aunt Maria was particularly pleased with the specimens of her own sex; she went into ecstasies over their gentle physiognomies and their well-combed, carefully braided, glossy hair; she admired their long gowns of black woollen, each with a yellow stripe around the waist and a border of the same at the bottom. "Such a sensible costume!" she said.
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