Health is one eminent quality in this pleasing writer. Free originally from morbid tendencies, he has nursed and cherished this happy tone of mind by perusing chiefly healthy authors. He has acted on the principle that the whole should be kept from the sick. He has dipped but sparingly into the pages of Byron and Shelley, whereas Wordsworth, Wilson, Southey, and Scott, are the gods of his idolatry. Scott is transcendently clear. Indeed, we think that he gives to him, as a poet, a place beyond his just deserts. His ease, simplicity, romantic interest, and Border fire, have blinded him to his faults, his fatal facility of verse, his looseness of construction, and his sad want of deep thought and original sentiment. To name him beside or above Wordsworth, the great consecrated bard of his period, is certainly a heresy of no small order. One or two of Wordsworth's little poems, or of his sonnets, are, we venture to say, in genuine poetical depth and beauty, superior to Scott's five larger poems put together. They are long, lively, rambling, shallow, and blue, glittering streams. Wordsworth's ballads are deep and clear as those mountain pools over which bends the rowan, and on which smiles the autumn sky, as on the fittest reflector of its own bright profundity and solemn clearness.
Well did Christopher North characterize Delta as the poet of the spring. He was the darling of that darling season. In all his poetry there leaped and frolicked "vernal delight and joy." He had in some of his verses admirably, and on purpose, expressed the many feelings or images which then throng around the heart, like a cluster of bees settling at once upon flower—the sense of absolute newness, blended with a faint, rich thrill of recollection—the fresh bubbling out of the blood from the heart-springs—the return of the reveries of childhood or youth—the intolerance of the fireside—the thirst after nature renewed within the soul—the strange glory shed upon the earth, all red and bare though it yet be—the attention excited by every thing, "even by the noise of the fly upon the sunny wall, or the slightest murmur of creeping waters"—the springing up of the sun from his winter declinature—the softer and warmer lustre of the stars—and the new emphasis with which men pronounce the words "hope" and "love." To crown a spring evening, there sometimes appears in the west the planet Venus, bright yellow-green, shivering as with ecstasy in the orange or purple sky, and rounding off the whole scene into the perfection of beauty. The Scottish poet of spring did not forget this element of its glory, but sung a hymn to that fair star of morn and eve worthy of its serene, yet tremulous splendor.
Delta was eminently a national writer. He did not gad abroad in search of the sublime or strange, but cultivated the art of staying at home. The scenery of his own neighborhood, the traditions or the histories of his own country, the skies and stars of Scotland, the wild or beautiful legends which glimmer through the mist of its past—these were "the haunt and the main region of his song," and hence, in part, the sweetness and the strength of his strains. Indeed, it is remarkable that nearly all our Scottish poets have been national and descriptive. Scotland has produced no real epic, few powerful tragedies, few meditative poems of a high rank, but what a mass of poetry describing its own scenery and manners, and recording its own traditions. King James the Sixth, Gawin Douglas, Davie Lyndsay, Ramsay, Fergusson, Ross of the "Faithful Shepherdess," Burns, Beattie, Sir Walter Scott, Wilson, Aird, Delta, and twenty more, have been all more or less national in their subject, or language, or both. We attribute this, in a great measure, to the extreme peculiarity of Scottish manners, as they were, and to the extreme and romantic beauty of Scottish scenery. The poetic minds, in a tame country like England, are thrown out upon foreign topics, or thrown in upon themselves; whereas, in Scotland, they are arrested and detained within the circle of their own manners and mountains. "Paint us first," the hills seem to cry aloud. A reason, too, why we have had few good tragedies or meditative poems, may be found in our national narrowness of creed, and in our strong prejudice against dramatic entertainments. As it is, we have only Douglas, and three or four good plays of Miss Baillie's, to balance Shakspeare, Ben Jonson, and all that galaxy—not to speak of the multitudes who have followed—and only the "Grave," the "Minstrel," and the "Course of Time," to compare with the works of George Herbert, Giles Fletcher, Quarles, Milton, Young, Cowper, and Wordsworth.
We find in Delta little meditative power or tendency. His muse had no "speculation" in her eye. Whether from caution, or from want of the peculiar faculty, he never approached those awful abysses of thought which are now attracting so many poets—attracting them, partly from a desire to look down into their darkness, and partly from a passion for those strange and shivering flowers which grow around their sides. Leigh Hunt, in his late autobiography, when speaking of Blanco White, seems to blame all religious speculation, as alike hopeless and useless. But, in the present day, unless there be religious speculation, there can, with men of mind, be little religion—no creed—nor even an approximation toward one. Would Mr. Hunt destroy that link, which in every age has bound us to the infinite and eternal? Would he bring us back to mere brute worship, and brute belief? Because we cannot at present form an infallible creed, should we beware of seeking to form a creed at all? Because we cannot see all the stars, must we never raise our eyes, or our telescopes, to the midnight heavens? Because HE has been able to reach no consistent and influential faith, ought all men to abandon the task? So far from agreeing with this dogmatic denunciation, we hold that it argues on the part of its author—revered and beloved though he be—a certain shallowness and levity of spirit—that its tendency is to crush a principle of aspiration in the human mind, which may be likened to an outspringing angel pinion, and that it indirectly questions the use and the truth of all revelation. We honor, we must say, Blanco White, in his noble struggles, and in his divine despair, more than Leigh Hunt, in his denial that such struggles are wiser than a maniac's trying to leap to the sun, and in the ignoble conceptions of man's position and destiny which his words imply. And, notwithstanding his chilling criticism, so unlike his wont, we believe still, with Coleridge, that not Wordsworth, nor Milton, have written a sonnet, embodying a thought so new and magnificent, in language so sweet and musical, and perfectly fitted to the thought, like the silvery new moon sheathed in a transparent fleecy cloud, as that of Blanco White's beginning with "Mysterious Night."
Delta, we have already said, gained reputation, in prose, as well as in verse. His Mansie Wauch, Tailor in Dalkeith, is one of the most delightful books in the language. It is partly, it is true, imitated from Galt; but, while not inferior to him in humor, it has infused a far deeper vein of poetry into the conception of common Scottish life. Honor to thee, honest Mansie! Thou art worth twenty Alton Lockes, the metaphysical tailor (certainly one of the absurdest creations, and surrounded by the most asinine story of the age, although redeemed by some glorious scenes, and one character, Sandy Mackay, who is just Thomas Carlyle humanized). But better than thee still, is thy 'prentice, Mungo Glen, with decline in his lungs, poetry in his heart, and on his lips one of the sweetest laments in the language! Many years have elapsed since we read thy life, but our laughter at thy adventures, and our tears at the death of thy poor 'prentice, seem as fresh as those of yesterday!
Why did Delta only open, and never dig out, this new and rich vein? He alone seemed adequate to follow, however far off, in the steps of the Great Wizard. Aird seemed to have exhausted his tale-writing faculty, exquisite as it was. Wilson's tales, with all their power, lack repose; they are too troubled, tearful, monotonous, and tempestuous. Galt, Miss Ferrier, the authoress of the Odd Volume, Macnish, &c., are dead....
We had not the pleasure of hearing Delta's recent lectures. They were, chatty, conversational, lively, full of information, although neither very eloquent, nor very profound. He knew too well the position in which he stood, and the provender which his audience required! Nor, we confess, did we expect to meet in them with a comprehensive or final vidimus of the poetry of the last fifty years. His Edinburgh eye has been too much dazzled and overpowered by the near orbs of Walter Scott and Wilson, to do justice to remoter luminaries. Nor was criticism exactly Delta's forte. He had not enough of subtility—perhaps not enough of profound native instinct—and, perhaps, some will think, not enough of bad blood. But his criticism must, we doubt not, be always sincere in feeling, candid in spirit, and manly in language. Still, we repeat, that his power and mission were in the description of the woods and streams, the feelings and customs, the beauties and peculiarities, of 'dear Auld Scotland.'
It may, perhaps, be necessary to add, that the name Delta was applied to Dr. Moir, from his signature in "Black wood," which was always Δ; that he was a physician in Musselburgh, and the author of some excellent treaties on subjects connected with his own profession; and that while an accomplished litterateur and beautiful poet, he never neglected his peculiar duties, but stood as high in the medical as in the literary world.