.

Both Goethe and Jacobi have left records of their intercourse, and
both are equally enthusiastic regarding the profit they derived from
it. From the first moment of their meeting there was a spontaneous
interchange of their deepest thoughts and feelings, unique in the
experience of both. In Jacobi's company Goethe became another man from
what he had been in the company of Lavater and Basedow. "I was weary,"
he says, "of my previous follies and wantonness, which, in truth, only
concealed my dissatisfaction that this journey had brought so little
profit to my mind and heart. Now, therefore, my deepest feelings broke
forth with irrepressible force." After a few days spent at Pempelfort,
during which Georg Jacobi joined them, the two brothers accompanied
Goethe to Cologne on his homeward journey. It was during the hours
they were together at Cologne that the conversation of Fritz and
Goethe became most intimate, and these hours remained a moving memory
with both even when in after years divided aims and interests had
estranged them. A visit to the cathedral of Cologne recalled Goethe's
enthusiasm for the cathedral of Strassburg, but its unfinished
condition depressed him with the sense of a great idea unrealised, for
in his own words "an unfinished work is like one destroyed." The
emotions evoked by another spectacle in Duesseldorf, according to
Goethe's own testimony, had the instantaneous effect of his gaining
for life the confidence of both Jacobis. The sight which equally moved
all three was the unchanged interior of the mansion of a citizen of
Cologne named Jabach, who a century before had been distinguished as
an amateur of the fine arts. But what specially impressed them was a
picture by Le Brun representing Jabach and his family in all the
freshness of life, and the consequent reflection that this picture was
the sole memorial that they had ever lived. "This reflection," Georg
Jacobi comments, "made a profound impression on our stranger,"[184]
and the impression must have been abiding, since in no passage of his
Autobiography does he recall more vividly the emotions of a vanished
time.

[Footnote 184: Biedermann, _op. cit._ i. 45.]

The evening of the day they spent in Cologne is noted both by Goethe
and Fritz Jacobi as marking a point in their intellectual development.
The inn in which they were quartered overlooked the Rhine, the murmur
of whose moonlit waters was attuned to the sentiments that had been
evo