But Mr. Swinburne's attack reminds one also of something more important even than "Addison"; the antithesis and opposition which exists between two great orders of poets, of which his friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Whitman himself may be taken as the types. The _Blessed Damozel_ is in another world from any page of the _Leaves_; and there is almost nothing which the two poets seem to share. Mr. Swinburne did good service, in so far as he pointed the contrast; but he confused it by declaiming against the prophet, and extolling the sonneteer. The field may not so be limited; the exile of Byron, Emerson and Carlyle from the brotherhood of poets, though proclaimed by Mr. Swinburne, can hardly be enforced. For as Whitman has suggested,[720] there are, inevitably, two kinds of great poetry: one corresponding, as it were, to the song of the Nightingale, and another to the flight of the Eagle. He himself has nothing of the infinitely allusive grace of the former, the sonnet-twining interpreters of the romantic past, the painters of subtle dream-beauties and fair women whose faces are the faces of unearthly flowers wrought purely of the passions of dead men. But they again have nothing of his appeal to the heroic and kingly spirit that confronts the equally romantic future, grappling with world-tragedies and creating the new beauty of passions hitherto unborn. Doubtless the greatest poets unite these two orders, reconciling them in their own persons; but such are the very greatest of all time. I do not think that Whitman himself would have admitted a claim on his behalf to be counted among them.[721] * * * * * The sheets he had been correcting with Traubel's aid, in the crisis of his illness, were those of _November Boughs_, a volume composed, like _Two Rivulets_, of prose and verse. It appeared in November, 1888. Among its prose papers are sympathetic studies of Burns and of Elias Hicks, with an appreciation of George Fox.[722] There are also many reminiscences, notably of the Old Bowery Theatre, and of New Orleans; and most interesting of all, a biographical study of the origins and purpose of the _Leaves_ themselves.