He had come to Rome and not found...

"Goethe admitted that he could not 'say in what specifically the new light consists', and he never tells us what the disease was from which he had been cured, but we may take it that it was something like the hope of fulfilment in which he had been traveling since September [1786], the yearning that had gnawed at his heart since his youth. But the yearning had been cured not through being satisfied, but through his recognizing, and refusing any longer to tolerate, the unreality of its object. He had come to Rome and not found what he was looking for, and that, he thought, was his great discovery. He had set out on a 'symbolical' journey, and at its end had discovered the limits on the world's willingness to be filled with his own personal meaning. He had come looking for culmination, enjoyment, and a revelatory immediacy of experience, and he had found, or thought he had found, the need for study, informed understanding, and hard work."

-- Goethe: The Poet and the Age, Vol. I: The Poetry of Desire, Nicholas Boyle, 1991, p. 441.