As the Liberty lads o'er the sea Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood, So we, boys, we Will die fighting, or live free, And down with all kings but King Ludd!

When the web that we weave is complete, And the shuttle exchanged for the sword, We will fling the winding-sheet O'er the despot at our feet, And dye it deep in the gore he has pour'd.

Though black as his heart its hue, Since his veins are corrupted to mud, Yet this is the dew Which the tree shall renew Of Liberty, planted by Ludd!

At the Villa Diodati in the summer of 1816, Lord Byron (1788-1824) and John Polidori (1795-1821) joined Mary and Percy Shelley in their competition to write ghost stories on the model of German Gothic narratives.

Shelley is probably citing "palaces of nature" from Lord Byron's Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III, published in 1816: “Above me are the Alps, / The palaces of Nature, whose vast walls / Have pinnacled in clouds their snowy scalps, / And throned Eternity in icy halls / Of cold sublimity” (lxii.590–94).

Along with Percy Shelley and Mary, Lord Byron, his sister Claire Clairmont, and their friend John Polidori huddled in the Villa Diodati on the shore of Lake Geneva and vowed to write ghost stories modeled on the German horror tales of the volume Fantasmagoriana (1812). While Percy Shelley and Lord Byron did not fulfill their vow to write such tales, Polidori wrote the kernel of "The Vampyre" (published in 1819), while Mary wrote the first draft of Frankenstein.

Lord Byron (1788-1824) had published the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, a poetic sensation across Europe that give him instant celebrity, in 1812. Canto 3 would be published in 1816 and Canto 4 in 1818.