On 23 September 1818 Schopenhauer struck out, as planned, for Italy. He was excited to leave Dresden and the serious business of excavating for the philosopher's stone. He wrote to Goethe that he longed for the gentle clime of Italy and to enjoy the country that Dante described as “where yes resounds,” and where, he added, “the no, no of all literary journals would not reach me.” He had already heard a singular “no” in the only review of his On Vision and Colors. An anonymous reviewer had published a negative review in the Leipziger Litteratur-Zeitung, a journal that had already bashed Goethe's On the Theory of Colors a few years earlier. The sensation caused by his color theory, he told Goethe, was like throwing a stone into a bog – no ripples. Little did he realize that he would be tossing the philosopher's stone into the same bog. Just as he had told Brockhaus, he also told Goethe that his philosophy, which he still thought would appear at Michaelmas, was not simply the fruit of his time at Dresden, but to a certain measure, the fruit of his life. Again, he evoked Helvetius's observation that between the thirtieth and thirty-fifth years, all meaningful impressions about the world are fixed in one's mind, with everything that follows being simply the further development of those ideas. He reminded Goethe that he was now in his thirty-first year.