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