Explore "Feelings of a Republican on the Fall of Bonaparte" by Percy Bysshe Shelley on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I hated thee, fallen tyrant! I did groan / To think that a most unambitious 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 prayed, 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.