For data gathering in large-scale wireless sensor networks, not only energy consumption of nodes but also data collection delay should be considered. It is a challenging problem to achieve the goal of balancing energy consumption of nodes and minimizing data collection delay in the network at the same time. In order to balance energy consumption of nodes, this paper utilizes a mobile data collector to collect data in the network, and proposes an algorithm named DC-Collection to solve the problem of minimizing data collection delay and energy consumption. First, DC-Collection constructs a shortest path tree. If the network is not connected, there are more than one shortest path trees (i.e., there is a set of shortest path trees in the network). Second, some nodes in the trees are selected as collective nodes or lingering nodes, where a collective node is the root of a height-limited tree that will receive data sent from its descendant nodes and a lingering node is a normal node that the mobile data collector will visit at a given time to collect sensing data. The mobile data collector can collect the data of all nodes in the network as long as it traverses the locations of all lingering nodes. The heights of the trees that rooted at the collective nodes are limited to be smaller than h. There is at least a lingering node exists in the communication area of each collective node. Third, DC-Collection adjusts the structures of the height-limited trees. It makes nodes with higher energy level possess more descendants, so as to maximize the network lifetime by balancing the energy consumption of nodes. Finally, the mobile data collector starts from a Sink, and traverses locations of the lingering nodes in sequence to collect data. After collecting all the data, it returns to the starting point and uploads the data to the Sink. Compared with existing algorithms, theoretical analyses and simulations show that DC-Collection can not only balance the energy consumption of nodes to prolong the network lifetime, but also shorten the path length that the mobile data collector walks to reduce the data collection delay.