Time, in the distinguished men who had been gathered to their graves in the year which has just ended, and with whom, though unconscious of the fate impending over him, he was, within the few remaining days of that year, to be numbered.
Mr. Sands, just before his death, had engaged to furnish, for this Magazine, an article on Esquimaux Literature. He had consulted, for this purpose, all the common books containing any thing which related to that singular race of people; and on the sixteenth of December, had procured a history of Greenland, in two volumes, written by David Crantz, a German missionary, who, in the year 1761, was sent to Greenland by the United Brethren, and resided there a twelvemonth, for the express purpose of compiling a description of the country, and whose work is full of curious and minute information respecting those frozen latitudes and their inhabitants. He immediately gave himself, with his usual intense application, to the perusal of this book, in order to fill his mind with ideas of the Esquimaux modes of life, their traditions and their mythology. He had already finished an introduction to the article, which was a review of an imaginary book of translations from the Esquimaux language, and had written two fragments, which he intended for supposed specimens of Greenland poetry. After another interval of close reading, he again, on the seventeenth of December, about four o'clock in the afternoon, sat down to the work of composition. He merely wrote with a pencil the following line, suggested probably by some topic in the Greenland mythology,
Oh think not my spirit among you abides,
when he was suddenly struck with the disease which removed his own spirit from its material dwelling. Below this line, on the original manuscript, were observed, after his death, several irregular pencil marks, extending nearly across the page, as if traced by a hand that moved in darkness, or no longer obeyed the impulse of the will. He rose, opened the door, and attempted to pass out of the room, but fell on the threshhold. On being assisted to his chamber and placed on the bed, he was observed to raise his powerless right arm with the other, and looking at it, to shed tears. It was soon discovered that the disorder was an apoplectic stroke; he shortly after relapsed into a lethargy, from which he never awoke, and in less than four hours from the attack expired without a struggle.
