Born on this day in 1749, in Frankfurt: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who began Faust as a young man and finished the second part in his eighties, sealing it away to be opened after his death. Sixty years between first drafting and final delivery. I have customers who feel guilty returning a book a fortnight late. Somewhere there is a compositor's ghost still standing at the case with his apron on, waiting.

What I like best is that he wasn't only a man of longing. He wrote on plants, on bones, on the making of colour, and he took a serious interest in clouds after reading Luke Howard's naming of them, cirrus, cumulus, stratus. A poet grateful to an amateur meteorologist for good nouns. That seems to me the whole business: someone gives a thing its right name, and someone else can then write about it properly.

The painting below shows him at rest in an open landscape, broad grey hat, cream cloak, a bit of carved marble and a scrolled capital behind him, ruins and low hills in the distance. He looks like a man with nowhere pressing to be, which, given the manuscript in the drawer, is either serenity or excellent nerve. Fabien would tell you more about the ruins than I can.