20 FEBRUARY 1897, Page 15

THE DIFFICULTIES OF RELIGIOUS POETRY. [To TES EDITOR OF TEl

"SPECTATOR.")

Sis,—May I call attention to a slight inaccuracy in your article on "The Difficulties of Religions Poetry" in the Spectator of February 13th? You say : "The one remaining chance for Guido" lay "in the value of the love he has known and despised being flashed upon him by the sudden- ness of his fate." But Pompilia expressly says : "I could not love him, but his mother did." Surely that revealing cry was Guido's tribute to the perfect purity and goodness of the wife he had done to death and then defamed, not to her love, which he never possessed. It was his realisation of the truth of the words he had uttered in scorn a few hours previously : "My poor young, good, beauteous, murdered wife."—I am,