creontic poem in praise of water, the sole beverage of the Greenlanders, and which is kept by them, according to Crantz, generally in copper vessels, and cooled from time to time with ice or snow.
POETRY OF THE ESQUIMAUX.
The title of this article may, at the first flush, surprise some of our reading and not merely nominal readers. It is not very probable that the extremely novel little work before us has fallen into the hands of any of them. Messrs. Peabody & Co. believe that they are the sole possessors of a copy, on this side of the Atlantic; but, like other publishers, and other people, they are extremely liable to be mistaken; since the intercourse carried on over the waste of waters is nearly as miscellaneous as the flight of birds in the upper element. Before this notice may see the light of publicity, half a dozen other enterprising monthlies in this country may possibly get a copy of Professor Skallagrimston's work.[1] But it is doubtful. Messrs. Peabody & Co. are not inclined to believe it; and we feel as if we were treading, in some measure, on fresh and original, dew-bespangled, or rather frost-congealed ground.
Dr. Thorlief Glum Skallagrimston is well known to all who take any interest in, or have heard of, the proceedings of the "Foreign Missionary and Tract Society of Great Britain and Ireland," as the accomplished and able translator of the Gospels and a portion of the Apocrypha, into the language of the "universal Esquimaux nation." We parody a phrase which has been bestowed on our eastern fellow-citizens, of which they have reason to be proud; and think that we do it legitimately. Whoever has been taught "geography and the use of the globes," and will take the trouble to consider the nature of the arctic circle, and the contiguous portions of ice, water, and earth, must be satisfied that those who, from choice or necessity, live in such high latitudes, can easily find the ways and means of circumventing the pole, and be nearly as well off any-where, in the same parallel. The Esquimaux, or Iskimoes, (as Doctor Skallagrimston calls them, by way of un-frenchifying their genuine title,) seem to have been of this opinion; for they settled and squatted in nearly all the frozen
- ↑ Specimens of the Poetry of the Iskimoes. Shaw, Smith & Scroggins. London, 1832.
