“Theirs is no vulgar sepulchre--green sods
Are all their monument, and yet it tells
A nobler history than pillared piles
Or the eternal pyramids.”
"The Graves of the Patriots," first published in the United States Literary Gazette, Vol. 2 (1825).
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James Gates Percival 4
American geologis, poet, and surgeon 1795–1856Related quotes

Bk. IX, ch. 1
War and Peace (1865–1867; 1869)
Context: In historical events great men — so-called — are but labels serving to give a name to the event, and like labels they have the least possible connection with the event itself. Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own free will, is in an historical sense not free at all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history, and predestined from all eternity.

“Blessings be with them, and eternal praise,
Who gave us nobler loves, and nobler cares!”
The Poets, who on earth have made us heirs
Of truth and pure delight by heavenly lays.
Personal Talk, Stanza 4
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Introduction
1830s, Nature http://www.emersoncentral.com/nature.htm (1836)

Footnote: It probably could not fall down if it tried.
The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950), Part I: It Seems There Were Two Egyptians, Cheops, or Khufu

From Gibbs's obituary for Rudolf Clausius (1889). See The Collected Works of J. Willard Gibbs, vol. 2 (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1928), p. 267. Complete volume http://www.archive.org/details/collectedworksj00longgoog

"The Dirge of Alaric, the Visigoth" In The New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal Vol. V, No. 25 (January-June 1823), p. 64.