There is one Mind, one omnipresent Mind
Omnific.  His most holy name is Love.

From Him—­

... we roam unconscious, or with hearts
Unfeeling of our universal Sire,

and the greatest thing we can achieve, “our noon-tide majesty,” is—­

to know ourselves
Parts and proportions of one wonderous whole!

The way to attain this knowledge is not by a process of reasoning, but by a definite act of will, when the “drowsed soul” begins to feel dim recollections of its nobler nature, and so gradually becomes attracted and absorbed to perfect love—­

              and centered there

God only to behold, and know, and feel,
Till by exclusive consciousness of God
All self-annihilated it shall make
God its Identity:  God all in all!

This sense of “oneness,” with the desire to reach out to it, was very strong with Coleridge in these earlier years, and he writes to Thelwall in 1797, “The universe itself, what but an immense heap of little things?...  My mind feels as if it ached to behold and know something great, something one and indivisible.”  He is ever conscious of the symbolic quality of all things by which we are visibly surrounded,

        all that meets the bodily sense I deem
    Symbolical, one mighty alphabet
    For infant minds.[48]

To pierce through the outer covering, and realise the truth which they embody, it is necessary to feel as well as to see, and it is the loss of this power of feeling which Coleridge deplores in those bitterly sad lines in the Dejection Ode when he gazes “with how blank an eye” at the starry heavens, and cries,

    I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!

It is in this Ode that we find the most complete description in English verse of that particular state of depression and stagnation which often follows on great exaltation, and to which the religious mystics have given the name of the “dark night of the soul.”  This is an experience, not common to all mystics, but very marked in some, who, like St John of the Cross and Madame Guyon, are intensely devotional and ecstatic.  It seems to be a well-defined condition of listlessness, apathy, and dryness, as they call it, not a state of active pain, but of terrible inertia, weariness, and incapacity for feeling; “a wan and heartless mood,” says Coleridge,

    A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,
      A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,
      Which finds no natural outlet, no relief,
        In word, or sigh, or tear.

Coleridge’s distrust of the intellect as sole guide, and his belief in some kind of intuitional act being necessary to the apprehension of reality, which he felt as early as 1794, was strengthened by his study of the German transcendental philosophers, and in March 1801 he writes, “My opinion is that deep thinking is attainable only by a man of deep feeling; and that all truth is a species of Revelation.”