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