heroic toil,
witnesseth his heroism. These, the marks of his fidelity." Thus, for
those who have skill to read the writing, every great man's face is
written all over with the literature of character. His body condenses
his entire history, just as the Declaration of Independence is
condensed into the limits of a tiny silver coin.

Calm majesty is in the face of Washington; pathetic patience and
divine dignity in that of Lincoln; unyielding granite is in John
Brown's face, though sympathy hath tempered hardness into softness;
intellect is in Newton's; pure imagination is in Keats' and in
Milton's; heroic substance is in the face of Cromwell and in that of
Luther; pathetic sorrow is found in Dante's eyes; conscience and love
shine in the face of Fenelon. Verily, the body is the soul's
interpreter! Like Paul, each man bears about in his body the marks,
either of ignorance and sin, of fear and remorse, or the marks of
heroism and virtue, of love and integrity. To the gospel of the page
let us add the gospel of the face.

But let none count it a strange thing that the soul within registers
its experiences in the body without. God hates secrecy and loves
openness. He hath ordained that nature and man shall publish their
secret lives. Each seed and germ hath an instinctive tendency toward
self-revelation. Every rosebud aches with a desire to unroll its
petals and exhibit its scarlet secret. Not a single piece of coal but
will whisper to the microscope the full story of that far-off scene
when boughs and buds and odorous blossoms were pressed together in a
single piece of shining crystal. The great stone slabs with the bird's
track set into the rock picture forth for us the winged creatures of
the olden time. When travelers through the Rocky Mountains behold the
flaming advertisements written on the rocks, the reflection comes to
all that nature also uses the rock pages for keeping her private
memoranda of all those events connected with her history of fire and
flood and glacier. When we speak of a scientific discovery, we mean
that some keen-eyed thinker has come upon a page of nature's diary and
copied it for his printer. The sea shells lying upon the crest of the
high hills make one chapter in the story of that age when the ocean's
waves broke against the peaks of the high mountains.

Journeying in his summer vacation into the region about Hudson Bay,
the traveler brings back pieces of coal containing tropic growths.
The