5 FEBRUARY 1937, Page 21

MISS CLEMENCE HOUSMAN'S POETRY

[To the Editor of TuE SPECTATOR.]

SIR,—I agree with Mr. John Sparrow that the couplet quoted in his review of Mr. Laurence Housman's The Unexpected Years is magnificent, when considered as the work of a little girl of nine. The first line is from Kingsley's Heroes, and rang in my ears, I think, before I was nine. I do not under- value the genius of a child who recognised a line of prose as a normal heroic line, but I feel bound to claim it as Kingsley's.