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." Coleridge, following Kant, gave the somewhat misleading name of "reason" (as opposed to "understanding") to the intuitive power by which man apprehends God directly, and, in his view, imagination is the faculty, which in the light of this intuitive reason interprets and unifies the symbols of the natural world. Hence its value, for it alone gives man the key Of that eternal language, which thy God Utters, who from eternity doth teach Himself in all, and all things in himself.[49]