Prologue For R.R.R.

As you sit in your quiet home, surrounded by peace, comfort and civilization
Do you, listener, remember those memories; grand and tearful which still, after hundreds of years, remain now radiant with the brightness of sunlight
And now darkening like indelible bloodstains the variegated pictures of history?
Can your thoughts, torpid with repose, transport themselves back to the horrors and joys of the past,
Not straying indifferently from one thing to another which excites your curiosity, but taking a warm and vital interest.

As if you yourself stood in the midst of those struggles now long since fought out?
Bled in them, conquered or fell in them, and felt your heart beat with hope or apprehension according as fortune smiled or betrayed?
Standing on the heights of history and looking far around the wild arena of human destiny, can your transfer yourself into the veil(vale?) Of the past,
The life physically buried and decayed, but spiritually in (most?) Which constitutes the essence and substance of history
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man, with a wide brow and pulseless heart? Weighing all things in the balance of reason.

Is not, rather, the genius of history like an eternally-blooming maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
Therefore; if you have the capacity to suffer, or rejoice with the generations that have been.
To hate with them, to love with them; to be transported, to admire, to despise, to curse as they have done.

In a word: to live among them with your whole heart, and not along with your cold, reflecting judgement?
Then follow me! I will lead you down into the vale, my hand is weak and my sketch humble, but your heart will guide you better than I.
Upon that, I rely, and begin.