Note 43 — Chapter V · A MIDLAND VILLAGE: RAILWAY AND WOODLAND.

As in Milton’s “most musical, most melancholy.” But as Coleridge remarks in a note to his own poem of the Nightingale, in Sibylline Leaves, these words of Milton are spoken in the character of the melancholy man, and have therefore a dramatic rather than a descriptive propriety. Coleridge’s own conception of the song is the true one and most happily expressed.