While Goethe was working with inexhaustible energy, he did not neglect his friends, and he had many opportunities of adding to their number. Lavater, who was making active preparations for his much-talked-of book on Physiognomy, wrote to Goethe from Zürich, and in 1774 spent a week as a guest in his father’s house. Years afterwards, Lavater, although always one of the most popular clergymen of his time, repelled many of those who had known him intimately by mingled fanaticism and vanity; but now Goethe was strongly attracted by his enthusiasm, and took an extraordinary interest in his notions as to the possibility of understanding the mind through its expression in the body, and especially in the face. With Lavater’s friend Basedow, the ardent upholder of Rousseau’s ideas on education, Goethe was also on friendly terms. He was often, however, irritated by Basedow’s boorish talk; for, notwithstanding his zeal for “nature” in social intercourse, Goethe detested rude and arrogant assumption. He himself was the brightest and pleasantest of companions, with a manner made all the more attractive by a touch of lively Bohemianism. It may be worth noting that there was no trace of Bohemianism in his appearance. He dressed well--so well, indeed, that it was often hard for him (his father being by no means generous) to pay his tailor’s bills. Another of his intimate friends was Johanna Fahlmer, the aunt of the brothers Jacobi, both of whom were beginning to make a mark in literature. She settled at Frankfort with her mother in 1772, and Goethe, who made her acquaintance soon after his return from Wetzlar, valued few of his friends so highly as the young, genial, and clever “Aunt Fahlmer.” She was anxious that he should enter into close relations with her nephews, but their writings did not quite please him, and for a long time he made no attempt to approach them. In 1774, however, he felt that it might be pleasant for him to know them, and in the summer, having spent some weeks with Lavater and Basedow at Ems, he made his way with these friends up the Rhine to Cologne--“a prophet to the right, a prophet to the left, the child of the world in the midst,” as he wrote in a humorous little poem describing their dinner at Coblenz. At Cologne the party broke up, and Goethe went on to Düsseldorf, where the Jacobis lived. As it happened, they were at Elberfeld, and thither Goethe followed them. The younger of the two brothers, Frederick Jacobi, who was Goethe’s senior by about six years, made a most agreeable impression on him, and at Pempelfort, Jacobi’s country house near Düsseldorf, they became fast friends. They visited Cologne together, and had so happy a day there that at night, when each had retired to his room in the inn, Goethe could not resist the impulse to renew their talk. So he went to Jacobi’s room, and sitting at the open window, looking out on the moonlit Rhine, they enjoyed an hour of