The vast impetus, which these extraordinary geniuses gave to freedom in metaphysical strongholds, led to a corresponding degree of liberty in the political and social relations. Shelley was not one who "beheld the woe In which mankind was bound, and deem'd that fate Which made them abject, would preserve them so." but on the contrary was aware of the progressive character of the race, and threw himself with all his heart and soul into the cause of Republicanism, and never slackened in his efforts till death took him from his work. His noblest endeavors were directed toward the cause of suffering humanity, crushed under the weight of despotism; and his tuneful lyre was ever struck in behalf of the Goddess of Freedom, to whom, in that soul inspiring "Ode to Liberty," he offers chaplets of the most glorious verse to rouse the nations from their apathy. He has given us his reflections on the English Revolution, when Cromwell crushed royalty under his feet in the person of the tyrant Charles Stuart, and which, notwithstanding, rose again to befoul, in the profligacy and debauchery of the second Carolian epoch; on the French Revolution, when an intelligent people drove out a brood of vampires, who had drained the blood of France too long, to be replaced by atrocious demagogues, hateful priest-ridden Bourbons and a Napoleon Bonaparte, the wholesale Jaffa poisoner, on whose death Shelley wrote lines pregnant with republican feelings: "I hated thee, fallen tyrant! I did groan To think that a most ambitious slave, Like thou, shouldst dance and revel on the grave Of Liberty. Thou mightst have built thy throne Where it had stood even now; thou didst prefer A frail and bloody pomp, which time has swept In fragments towards oblivion. Massacre, For this I pray'd would on thy sleep have crept, Treason and Slavery, Rapine, Fear and Lust, And stifled thee, their minister. I know Too late, since thou and France are in the dust, That virtue owns a more eternal foe Than force or fraud; old custom, legal crime, And bloody Faith, the foulest birth of time." With full knowledge of all this, he hopefully looked with loving eyes toward this side of the Atlantic, to your magnificent constitution and model Republic, built on the consolidated masonic bases of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, as did also the mass of my compatriots, who, suffering under a more intolerant despotism, and unable to help themselves, had no hand or voice in the attempted tyranny, from which your forefathers properly rebelled one hundred years ago.