veal any thing like that general outline of
feature and visage for which my fancy had by some strange working of
presentiment, prepared me. By-and-by, however, the light became
stronger, and I was enabled to study the minutiae of his face pretty
leisurely, while he leaned forward and read aloud the words of the
Psalm, for that is always done in Scotland, not by the clerk, but the
clergyman himself. At first sight, no doubt, his face is a coarse one,
but a mysterious kind of meaning breathes from every part of it, that
such as have eyes to see cannot be long without discovering. It is very
pale, and the large, half-closed eyelids have a certain drooping
melancholy weight about them, which interested me very much. I
understood not why. The lips, too, are singularly pensive in their mode
of falling down at the sides, although there is no want of richness and
vigor in their central fullness of curve. The upper lip, from the nose
downward, is separated by a very deep line, which gives a sort of
leonine firmness of expression to all the lower part of the face. The
cheeks are square and strong, in texture like pieces of marble, with the
cheek-bones very broad and prominent. The eyes themselves are light in
color, and have a strange dreamy heaviness, that conveys any idea rather
than that of dullness, but which contrasts in a wonderful manner with
the dazzling watery glare they exhibit when expanded in their sockets,
and illuminated into all their flame and fervor in some moment of high
entranced enthusiasm. But the shape of the forehead is, perhaps, the
most singular part of the whole visage; and, indeed, it presents a
mixture so very singular, of forms commonly exhibited only in the widest
separation, that it is no wonder I should have required some little time
to comprehend the meaning of it. In the first place, it is without
exception the most marked mathematical forehead I ever met with--being
far wider across the eyebrows than either Mr. Playfair's or Mr.
Leslie's--and having the eyebrows themselves lifted up at their exterior
ends quite out of the usual line, a peculiarity which Spurzheim had
remarked in the countenances of almost all the great mathematical or
calculating geniuses--such, for example, if I rightly remember, as Sir
Isaac Newton himself, Kaestener, Euler, and many others. Immediately
above the extraordinary breadth of this region, which, in the heads of
most mathematical persons, is surmounted by no fine poin