Lyrics
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 pages 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, looking far around the wild arena of human
destiny, can you transfer yourself into the well of the past? A life physically
buried and decayed, but spiritually inmost, which constitutes the essence and
substance of history
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and
pulse-less heart, waging all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the
genius of history like an eternal, imploring 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 generation
that had 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 alone with your cold, reflecting judgement
Then follow me. I will lead you down into the well. My hand is weak and my
sketch humble, but your heart will guide you better than I.
Upon that I rely and begin