y, influence conduct, or diversify
characters; the summer should be spent only in providing for the winter,
and the winter in longing for the summer.

Yet learned curiosity is known to have found its way into these abodes
of poverty and gloom: Lapland and Iceland have their historians, their
criticks, and their poets; and love, that extends his dominion wherever
humanity can be found, perhaps exerts the same power in the
Greenlander's hut as in the palaces of eastern monarchs.

In one of the large caves to which the families of Greenland retire
together, to pass the cold months, and which may be termed their
villages or cities, a youth and maid, who came from different parts of
the country, were so much distinguished for their beauty, that they were
called by the rest of the inhabitants Anningait and Ajut, from a
supposed resemblance to their ancestors of the same names, who had been
transformed of old into the sun and moon.

Anningait for some time heard the praises of Ajut with little emotion,
but at last, by frequent interviews, became sensible of her charms, and
first made a discovery of his affection, by inviting her with her
parents to a feast, where he placed before Ajut the tail of a whale.
Ajut seemed not much delighted by this gallantry; yet, however, from
that time was observed rarely to appear, but in a vest made of the skin
of a white deer; she used frequently to renew the black dye upon her
hands and forehead, to adorn her sleeves with coral and shells, and to
braid her hair with great exactness.

The elegance of her dress, and the judicious disposition of her
ornaments, had such an effect upon Anningait, that he could no longer be
restrained from a declaration of his love. He therefore composed a poem
in her praise, in which, among other heroick and tender sentiments, he
protested, that "she was beautiful as the vernal willow, and fragrant as
the thyme upon the mountains; that her fingers were white as the teeth
of the morse, and her smile grateful as the dissolution of the ice; that
he would pursue her, though she should pass the snows of the midland
cliffs, or seek shelter in the caves of the eastern cannibals: that he
would tear her from the embraces of the genius of the rocks, snatch her
from the paws of Amarock, and rescue her from the ravine of Hafgufa." He
concluded with a wish, that "whoever shall attempt to hinder his union
with Ajut, might be buried without his bow, and that, in the land of