After some time, the Knight, just as if he saw away through the seal, uttered some words which took hold of the youth on all sides. "There are," said he, "some vigorous natures which stand exactly on the boundary-line of genius and talent, fitted out, half for active, half for ideal effort, and, withal, of burning ambition. They feel forcibly all that is beautiful and great, and would fain create it again out of themselves; but they succeed only very feebly in doing so. They have not, like genius, one direction toward the centre of gravity, but they stand themselves at the gravitating point, so that the directions destroy each other. They are now poets, now painters, now musicians; most of all do they love in youth bodily courage, because in that strength most easily and expeditiously expresses itself through the arm. Hence, in early life, everything great which they see enraptures them, because they think to create it anew, but later in life quite annoys them, because, after all, they have not the power. They should, however, perceive that it is just they, if they know early how to guide their ambition, who have drawn the finest lot of various and harmonizing powers. They seem to be rightly fitted for the enjoyment of all that is beautiful, as well as for moral development and for the care of their being, for _whole_ men,--something like what a prince must be, because in that office one must have for his all-sided destination all-sided directions of effort and kinds of knowledge." They stood, as he said this, just on Mount Aventine; before them the Pyramid of Cestius, that epitaphium of the Heretics' Churchyard, wherein so many an undeveloped artist and youth sleeps, and, near by, the lofty potshard mountain[85] (_monte testaccio_), before which Albano always passed along with a miserable, sickly feeling of stale dreariness. The shock which his father's ideas gave his own, and the relationship of the potshard mountain to the strangers' churchyard, caused Albano to answer rather himself than his father, with a melted ice-drop of displeasure in his eye: "Such a nameless mountain of pots is, upon the whole, also the history of nations. But one would much rather kill one's self on the spot than, after a long life, to bury one's self so namelessly and ingloriously in the mass at last." After his union with himself, he grew more happy. Already he began with zeal to set himself to work, agreeably to his nature, which, as in the seed-corn, put forth out of one seed-point stem and root, thoughts and actions. He threw all other pursuits away, and studied the art of war, ancient and modern, for which Dian borrowed and supplied him the books and the study-chamber. With unspeakable delight and exaltation, he ran over again the sun-charts of the Roman history, here on the very body of the burnt-out sun itself, and often, when he read descriptions of its volcanic eruptions, he stood in the very craters where they had occurred.