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]
Carlyle's mysticism is the essence of his being, it flames through his amazing medley of writings, it guides his studies and his choice of subjects, it unifies and explains his visions, his thought, and his doctrines. His is a mystical attitude and belief of a perfectly simple and broad kind, including no abstruse subtleties of metaphysical speculation, as with Coleridge, but based on one or two deeply rooted convictions. This position seems to have been reached by him partly through intellectual conflict which found relief and satisfaction in the view of life taken by Goethe, Fichte, and other German "transcendental" thinkers; but partly also through a definite psychical experience which befell him in Edinburgh when he was twenty-six, and which from that day changed for him the whole of his outlook on life. He speaks of it himself as "a Spiritual New-birth, or Baphometic Fire-baptism." It came to him after a period of great wretchedness, of torture with doubt and despair, and--what is significant--"during three weeks of total sleeplessness." These are conditions which would be likely to reduce his body to the state of weakness and sensitiveness which seems often antecedent to psychic experience. He has given an account of the incident in _Sartor_ (Book ii. chap, vii.), when, he says, "there rushed like a stream of fire over my whole soul; and I shook base Fear away from me for ever. I was strong, of unknown strength; a spirit, almost a god." The revelation seems to have been of the nature of a certainty and assertion of his own inherent divinity, his "native God-created majesty," freedom and potential greatness. This brought with it a characteristic defiance of untoward outer circumstances which gave him strength and resolution. "Perhaps," he says, "I directly thereupon began to be a man."