[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.
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