I looked and looked, and sheep, sheep still,
Were all that I could see:
A change had struck the very hill—
O world! deceiving me.
Few descriptive poets excel Macintyre in his representations of external things, whether animate or inanimate. Everything he touches he invests with the glow and the beauty of poetry. The hills with their mist and deer, the streams and lochs with their teeming inhabitants, and all the natural inhabitants of his native glens and mountains, were congenial themes of his muse. “His Address to his wife—Mairi Bhan Og—may be read beside the sweetest and most expressive of the Lowland lyrics, while it certainly breathes a refined courtesy and a purity of sentiment which these do not always possess, and which is not in any way insignificant in such a man, whether taken as an index of his moral nature, of his intellectual endowments, or of the kindliness of nature in gifting him with such unaffected manliness and good taste.” Macdonald could be sweet and tender when he chose; it was far from being his nature. Macintyre is generally genial and tender, for it is the habitual attitude of his mind and heart. We are told “he was like the rest of the poets, [very fond of] company and a social glass, and was not only very pleasant over his bottle, but very circumspect.”
I give here a specimen of his poem, Ben-Dorain, of which we have a translation from the pen of Professor Blackie:—
My delight it was to rise
With the early morning skies,
All aglow,
And to brush the dewy height,