![the cultivated mind [55] always manifests in the operations of mechanical
art.
Illinois College has been founded but five or six years, yet it is now one
of the most flourishing institutions west of the mountains. The library
consists of nearly two thousand volumes, and its chymical apparatus is
sufficient. The faculty are five in number, and its first class was graduated
two years since. No one can doubt the vast influence this seminary is
destined to exert, not only upon this beautiful region of country and this
state, but over the whole great Western Valley. It owes its origin to the
noble enterprise of seven young men, graduates of Yale College, whose
names another age will enrol among our Harvards and our Bowdoins, our
Holworthys, Elliots, and Gores, great and venerable as those names are.
And, surely, we cannot but believe that "some divinity has shaped their
ends," when we consider the character of the spot upon which a wise
Providence has been pleased to succeed their design. From the Northern
lakes to the gulf, where may a more eligible site be designated for an
institution whose influence shall be wide, and powerful, and salutary, than
that same beautiful grove, in that pleasant village of Jacksonville.
To the left of the college buildings is situated the lordly residence of
Governor Duncan, surrounded by its extensive grounds.191 There are other
fine edifices scattered here and there upon the eminence, among which the
beautiful little cottage of Mr. C., brother to the great orator of the [56]
West, holds a conspicuous station.192 Society in Jacksonville is said to be
superior to any in the state. It is of a cast decidedly moral, and possesses
much literary taste. This is betrayed in the number of its schools and
churches; its lyceum, circulating library, and periodicals. In fine, there are
few spots in the West, and none in Illinois, which to the Northern emigrant
present stronger attractions than the town of Jacksonville and its vicinity.
Located in the heart of a tract of country the most fertile and beautiful in
the state; swept by the sweet breath of health throughout the year; tilled
by a race of enterprising, intelligent, hardy yeomen; possessing a moral,
refined, and enlightened society, the tired wanderer may here find his
necessities relieved and his peculiarities respected: he may here find
congeniality of feeling and sympathy of heart. And when his memory
wanders, as it sometimes must, with melancholy musings, mayhap, over
the loved scenes of his own distant New-England, it will be sweet to realize
that, though he sees not, indeed, around him the beautiful romance of his
native hills, yet many a kindly heart is throbbing near, whose emotions, like](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/21663-250407213952-e43b07d2/85/Clinical-Psychology-Science-Practice-and-Culture-4th-Edition-Pomerantz-Test-Bank-19-320.jpg)
![his own, were nurtured in their rugged bosom. "Cælum non animum
mutatur." And is it indeed true, as they often tell us, that New-England
character, like her own ungenial clime, is cold, penurious, and heartless;
while to her brethren, from whom she is separated only by an imaginary
boundary, may be ascribed all that is lofty, and honourable, and chivalrous
in man! This is an old [57] calumny, the offspring of prejudice and
ignorance, and it were time it were at rest. But it is not for me to contrast
the leading features of Northern character with those of the South, or to
repel the aspersions which have been heaped upon either. Yet, reader,
believe them not; many are false as ever stained the poisoned lip of
slander.
It was Saturday evening when I reached the village of Jacksonville, and
on the following Sabbath I listened to the sage instruction of that eccentric
preacher, but venerable old man, Dr. P. of Philadelphia, since deceased, but
then casually present. "The Young Men of the West" was a subject which
had been presented him for discourse, and worthily was it elaborated. The
good people of this little town, in more features than one, present a faithful
transcript of New-England; but in none do they betray their Pilgrim origin
more decidedly than in their devotedness to the public worship of the
sanctuary. Here the young and the old, the great and small, the rich and
poor, are all as steadily church-goers as were ever the pious husbandmen
of Connecticut—men of the broad breast and giant stride—in the most
"high and palmy day" of blue-laws and tything men. You smile, reader, yet
"Noble deeds those iron men have done!"
It was these same church-going, psalm-singing husbandmen who planted
Liberty's fair tree within our borders, the leaves of which are now for the
"healing of the nations," and whose broad branches are overshadowing the
earth; and they watered it—ay, watered it with their blood! The Pilgrim
Fathers!—[58] the elder yeomanry of New-England!—the Patriots of the
American Revolution!—great names! they shall live enshrined in the heart
of Liberty long after those of many a railer are as if they had never been.
And happy, happy would it be for the fair heritage bequeathed by them,
were not the present generation degenerate sons of noble sires.
At Jacksonville I tarried only a few days; but during that short period I
met with a few things of tramontane origin, strange enough to my Yankee
notions. It was the season approaching the annual election of
representatives for the state and national councils, and on one of the days](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/21663-250407213952-e43b07d2/85/Clinical-Psychology-Science-Practice-and-Culture-4th-Edition-Pomerantz-Test-Bank-20-320.jpg)
![to which I have alluded the political candidates of various creeds addressed
the people; that is—for the benefit of the uninitiated be it stated—each one
made manifest what great things he had done for the people in times past,
and promised to do greater things, should the dear people, in the
overflowing of their kindness, be pleased to let their choice fall upon him.
This is a custom of universal prevalence in the Southern and Western
states, and much is urged in its support; yet, sure it is, in no way could a
Northern candidate more utterly defeat his election than by attempting to
pursue the same. The charge of self-electioneering is, indeed, a powerful
engine often employed by political partisans.
The candidates, upon the occasion of which I am speaking, were six or
seven in number: and though I was not permitted to listen to the
eloquence of all, some of these harangues are said to have been powerful
productions, especially that of Mr. S. The day [59] was exceedingly sultry,
and Mr. W., candidate for the state Senate, was on the stump, in shape of a
huge meat-block at one corner of the market-house, when I entered.193 He
was a broadfaced, farmer-like personage, with features imbrowned by
exposure, and hands hardened by honourable toil; with a huge rent,
moreover, athwart his left shoulder-blade—a badge of democracy, I
presume, and either neglected or produced there for the occasion; much
upon the same principle, doubtless, that Quintilian counselled his disciples
to disorder the hair and tumble the toga before they began to speak. Now
mind ye, reader, I do not accuse the worthy man of having followed the
Roman's instructions, or even of acquaintance therewith, or any such thing;
but, verily, he did, in all charity, seem to have hung on his worst rigging,
and that, too, for no other reason than to demonstrate the democracy
aforesaid, and his affection for the sans-culottes. His speech, though
garnished with some little rhodomontade, was, upon the whole, a sensible
production. I could hardly restrain a smile, however, at one of the worthy
man's figures, in which he likened himself to "the morning sun, mounting a
stump to scatter the mists which had been gathering around his fair fame."
Close upon the heels of this ruse followed a beautiful simile—"a people free
as the wild breezes of their own broad prairies!" The candidates alternated
according to their political creeds, and denounced each other in no very
measured terms. The approaching election was found, indeed, to be the
prevailing topic of thought and conversation all over the land; insomuch
[60] that the writer, himself an unassuming wayfarer, was more than once,
strangely enough, mistaken for a candidate as he rode through the country,
and was everywhere catechumened as to the articles of his political faith. It](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/21663-250407213952-e43b07d2/85/Clinical-Psychology-Science-Practice-and-Culture-4th-Edition-Pomerantz-Test-Bank-21-320.jpg)
![would be an amusing thing to a solitary traveller in a country like this,
could he always detect the curious surmisings to which his presence gives
rise in the minds of those among whom he chances to be thrown;
especially so when, from any circumstance, his appearance does not betray
his definite rank or calling in life, and anything of mystery hangs around his
movements. Internal Improvement seems now to be the order of the day in
Northern Illinois. This was the hobby of most of the stump-speakers; and
the projected railway from Jacksonville to the river was under sober
consideration. I became acquainted, while here, with Mr. C., a young
gentleman engaged in laying off the route.
It was late in the afternoon when I at length broke away from the
hustings, and mounted my horse to pursue my journey to Springfield. The
road strikes off from the public square, in a direct line through the prairie,
at right angles with that by which I entered, and, like that, ornamented by
fine farms. I had rode but a few miles from the village, and was leisurely
pursuing my way across the dusty plain, when a quick tramping behind
attracted my attention, and in a few moments a little, portly, red-faced man
at my side, in linsey-woolsey and a broad-brimmed hat, saluted me frankly
with the title of "friend," and forthwith announced himself a "Baptist [61]
circuit-rider!" I became much interested in the worthy man before his path
diverged from my own; and I flatter myself he reciprocated my regard, for
he asked all manner of questions, and related all manner of anecdotes,
questioned or not. Among other edifying matter, he gave a full-length
biography of a "billards fever" from which he was just recovering; even
from the premonitory symptoms thereof to the relapse and final
convalescence.
At nightfall I found myself alone in the heart of an extensive prairie; but
the beautiful crescent had now begun to beam forth from the blue
heavens; and the wild, fresh breeze of evening, playing among the silvered
grass-tops, rendered the hour a delightful one to the traveller. "Spring
Island Grove," a thick wood upon an eminence to the right, looked like a
region of fairy-land as its dark foliage trembled in the moonlight. The
silence and solitude of the prairie was almost startling; and a Herculean
figure upon a white horse, as it drew nigh, passed me "on the other side"
with a glance of suspicion at my closely-buttoned surtout and muffled
mouth, as if to say, "this is too lone a spot to form acquaintance." A few
hours—I had crossed the prairie, and was snugly deposited in a pretty little
farmhouse in the edge of the grove, with a crusty, surly fellow enough for
its master.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/21663-250407213952-e43b07d2/85/Clinical-Psychology-Science-Practice-and-Culture-4th-Edition-Pomerantz-Test-Bank-22-320.jpg)
![XXVIII
"Hee is a rite gude creetur, and travels all
the ground over most faithfully."
"The web of our life is of a mingled yarn,
good and ill together."—Shakespeare.
It is a trite remark, that few studies are more pleasing to the inquisitive
mind than that of the nature of man. But, however this may be, sure it is,
few situations in life present greater facilities for watching its developments
than that of the ordinary wayfaring traveller. Though I fully agree with
Edmund Burke, that "the age of chivalry has passed away," with all its
rough virtues and its follies, yet am I convinced that, even in this
degenerate era of sophisters, economists, and speculators, when a solitary
individual, unconnected with any great movements of the day, throws
himself upon his horse, and sallies fearlessly forth upon the arena of the
world, whether in quest of adventure or not, he will be quite sure to meet,
at least, with some slight "inklings" thereof. A thousand exhibitions of
human character will fling themselves athwart his pathway, inconsiderable
indeed in themselves, yet which, as days of the year and seconds of the
day, go to make up the lineaments of man; and which, from the
observation of the pride, and pomp, and circumstance of wealth and
equipage, would of necessity be veiled. Under the eye of the solitary [63]
wanderer, going forth upon a pilgrimage of observation among the ranks of
men—who is met but for once, and whose opinion, favourable or
otherwise, can be supposed to exert but trifling influence—there is not that
necessity for enveloping those petty weaknesses of our nature in the
mantle of selfishness which would, under more imposing circumstances,
exist. To the mind of delicate sensibility, unschooled in the ways of man,
such exhibitions of human heartlessness might, perchance, be anything but
interesting; but to one who, elevated by independence of character above
the ordinary contingencies of situation and circumstance, can smile at the
frailties of his race, even when exhibited at his own expense, they can but
afford a fund of interest and instruction. The youthful student, when with
fresh, unblunted feeling he for the first time enters the dissecting-room of
medical science, turns with sickened, revolting sensibilities from the](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/21663-250407213952-e43b07d2/85/Clinical-Psychology-Science-Practice-and-Culture-4th-Edition-Pomerantz-Test-Bank-24-320.jpg)
![mutilated form stretched out upon the board before him, while the learned
professor, with untrembling nerve, lays bare its secrecies with the
crimsoned knife of science. Just so is it with the exhibitions of human
nature; yet who will say that dissection of the moral character of man is not
as indispensable to an intimate acquaintance with its phenomena, as that
of his physical organization for a similar purpose.
But, then, there are the brighter features of humanity, which sometimes
hang across the wanderer's pathway like the beautiful tints of a summer
evening bow; and which, as they are oftenest met reposing beneath the
cool, sequestered shades of [64] retirement, where the roar and tumult of
a busy world are as the heavy swing of the distant wave, so there, oftener
than elsewhere, they serve to cheer the pilgrim traveller's heart. Ah! it is
very sweet, from the dull Rembrandt shades of which human character
presents but too much, to turn away and dwell upon these green, beautiful
spots in the wastes of humanity; these oases in a desert of barrenness; to
hope that man, though indeed a depraved, unholy being, is not that thing
of utter detestation which a troubled bosom had sometimes forced us to
believe. At such moments, worth years of coldness and distrust, how
inexpressibly grateful is it to feel the young tendrils of the heart springing
forth to meet the proffered affection; curling around our race, and binding
it closer and closer to ourselves. But your pardon, reader: my wayward pen
has betrayed me into an episode upon poor human nature most
unwittingly, I do assure thee. I was only endeavouring to present a few
ideas circumstances had casually suggested, which I was sure would
commend themselves to every thinking mind, and which some incidents of
my wayfaring may serve to illustrate, when lo! forth comes an essay on
human nature. It reminds one of Sir Hudibras, who told the clock by
algebra, or of Dr. Young's satirised gentlewoman, who drank tea by
stratagem.
"How little do men realize the loveliness of this visible world!" is an
exclamation which has oftentimes involuntarily left my lips while gazing
upon the surpassing splendour of a prairie-sunrise. This is at all times a
glorious hour, but to a lonely traveller [65] on these beautiful plains of the
departed Illini, it comes on with a charm which words are powerless to
express. We call our world a Ruin. Ah! it is one in all its moral and physical
relations; but, like the elder cities of the Nile, how vast, how magnificent in
its desolation! The astronomer, as he wanders with scientific eye along the
sparkling galaxy of a summer's night, tells us that among those clustering
orbs, far, far away in the clear realms of upper sky, he catches at times a](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/21663-250407213952-e43b07d2/85/Clinical-Psychology-Science-Practice-and-Culture-4th-Edition-Pomerantz-Test-Bank-25-320.jpg)
![glimpse of another world! a region of untold, unutterable brightness! the
high empyrean, veiled in mystery! And so is it with our own humbler
sphere; the glittering fragment of a world we have never known ofttimes
glances before us, and then is gone for ever.
Before the dawn I had left the farmhouse where I had passed the night,
and was thridding the dark old forest on my route to Springfield. The dusky
twilight of morning had been slowly stealing over the landscape; and, just
as I emerged once more upon my winding prairie-path, the flaming sunlight
was streaming wide and far over the opposite heavens. Along the whole
line of eastern horizon reposed the purple dies of morning, shooting rapidly
upward into broad pyramidal shafts to the zenith, till at last the dazzling orb
came rushing above the plain, bathing the scene in an effulgence of light.
The day which succeeded was a fine one, and I journeyed leisurely onward,
admiring the mellow glories of woodland and prairie, until near noon, when
a flashing cupola above the trees reminded me I was approaching [66]
Springfield.194 Owing to its unfavourable situation and the fewness of its
public structures, this town, though one of the most important in the state,
presents not that imposing aspect to the stranger's eye which some more
inconsiderable villages can boast. Its location is the border of an extensive
prairie, adorned with excellent farms, and stretching away on every side to
the blue line of distant forest. This town, like Jacksonville, was laid out ten
or twelve years since, but for a long while contained only a few scattered
log cabins: all its present wealth or importance dates from the last six
years. Though inferior in many respects to its neighbour and rival, yet such
is its location by nature that it can hardly fail of becoming a place of
extensive business and crowded population; while its geographically central
situation seems to designate it as the capital of the state. An elegant state-
house is now erecting, and the seat of government is to be located here in
1840. The public square, a green, pleasant lawn, enclosed by a railing,
contains the courthouse and a market, both fine structures of brick: the
sides are lined with handsome edifices. Most of the buildings are small,
however, and the humble log cabin not unfrequently meets the eye. Among
the public structures are a jail, and several houses of worship. Society is
said to be excellent, and the place can boast much literary taste. The plan
of Internal Improvement projected for the state, when carried out, cannot
fail to render Springfield an important place.
It was a cool, beautiful evening when I left Springfield and held my way
over the prairie, rolling its [67] waving verdure on either side of my path.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/21663-250407213952-e43b07d2/85/Clinical-Psychology-Science-Practice-and-Culture-4th-Edition-Pomerantz-Test-Bank-26-320.jpg)
![Long after the village had sunk in the horizon, the bright cupola continued
to flame in the oblique rays of the setting sun. I passed many extensive
farms on my route, and in a few hours had entered the forest and forded
Sangamon River—so styled out of pure courtesy, I presume, for at the spot
I crossed it seemed little more than a respectable creek, with waters clear
as crystal, flowing over clean white sand.195 At periods of higher stages,
however, this stream has been navigated nearly to the confluence of its
forks, a distance of some hundred miles; and in the spring of 1832 a boat
of some size arrived within five miles of Springfield. An inconsiderable
expense in removing logs and overhanging trees, it is said, would render
this river navigable for keelboats half the year. The advantages of such a
communication, through one of the richest agricultural regions on the
globe, can hardly be estimated. The Sangamon bottom has a soil of
amazing fertility, and rears from its deep, black mould a forest of enormous
sycamores; huge, overgrown, unshapely masses, their venerable limbs
streaming with moss. When the traveller enters the depths of these dark
old woods, a cold chill runs over his frame, and he feels as if he were
entering the sepulchre. A cheerless twilight reigns for ever through them:
the atmosphere he inhales has an earthly smell, and is filled with floating
greenish exhalations; the moist, black mould beneath his horse's hoofs,
piled with vegetable decay for many feet, and upon whose festering bosom
the cheering light of day has not smiled for [68] centuries, is rank and
yielding: the enormous shafts leaning in all attitudes, their naked old roots
enveloped in a green moss of velvet luxuriance, tower a hundred feet
above his head, and shut out the heavens from his view: the huge wild-
vine leaps forth at their foot and clasps them in its deadly embrace; or the
tender ivy and pensile woodbine cluster around the aged giants, and strive
to veil with their mantling tapestry the ravages of time. There is much
cathedral pomp, much of Gothic magnificence about all this; and one can
hardly fling off from his mind the awe and solemnity which gathers over it
amid the chill, silent, and mysterious solitude of the scene.
Emerging from the river-bottom, my pathway lay along a tract of
elevated land, among beautiful forest-glades of stately oaks, through
whose long dim aisles the yellow beams of summer sunset were now richly
streaming. Once more upon the broad prairie, and the fragment of an iris
was glittering in the eastern heavens: turning back, my eye caught a view
of that singular but splendid phenomenon, seldom witnessed—a heavy,
distant rain-shower between the spectator and the departing sun.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/21663-250407213952-e43b07d2/85/Clinical-Psychology-Science-Practice-and-Culture-4th-Edition-Pomerantz-Test-Bank-27-320.jpg)
![Nightfall found me at the residence of Mr. D., an intelligent, gentlemanly
farmer, with whom I passed an agreeable evening. I was not long in
discovering that my host was a candidate for civic honours; and that he,
with his friend Mr. L., whose speech I had subsequently the pleasure of
perusing, had just returned from Mechanicsburg,196 a small village in the
vicinity, where they had been exerting themselves upon the stump to win
the aura popularis for the coming election. "Sic itur ad astra!"
[69] Before sunrise I had crossed the threshold of my hospitable
entertainer; and having wound my solitary way, partially by twilight, over a
prairie fifteen miles in extent,
"Began to feel, as well I might,
The keen demands of appetite."
Reining up my tired steed at the door of a log cabin in the middle of the
plain, the nature and extent of my necessities were soon made known to
an aged matron, who had come forth on my approach.
"Some victuals you shall get, stran-ger; but you'll just take your creetur
to the crib and gin him his feed; bekase, d'ye see, the old man is kind o'
drinkin to-day; yester' was 'lection, ye know." From the depths of my
sympathetic emotions was I moved for the poor old body, who with most
dolorous aspect had delivered herself of this message; and I had proceeded
forthwith, agreeable to instructions, to satisfy the cravings of my patient
animal, when who should appear but my tipsified host, in propria persona,
at the door. The little old gentleman came tottering towards the spot where
I stood, and, warmly squeezing my hand, whispered to me, with a most
irresistible serio-comic air, "that he was drunk;" and "that he was four hours
last night getting home from 'lection," as he called it. "Now, stran-ger, you
won't think hard on me," he continued, in his maudlin manner: "I'm a poor,
drunken old fellow! but old Jim wan't al'ays so; old Jim wan't al'ays so!" he
exclaimed, with bitterness, burying his face in his toilworn hands, as,
having now regained the house, he seated himself with difficulty upon the
[70] doorstep. "Once, my son, old Jim could knock down, drag out, whip,
lift, or throw any man in all Sangamon, if he was a leetle fellow: but now—
there's the receipt of his disgrace—there," he exclaimed, with vehemence,
thrusting forth before my eyes two brawny, gladiator arms, in which the
volumed muscles were heaving and contracting with excitement; ironed by
labour, but shockingly mutilated. Expressing astonishment at the spectacle,
he assured me that these wounds had been torn in the flesh by the teeth](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/21663-250407213952-e43b07d2/85/Clinical-Psychology-Science-Practice-and-Culture-4th-Edition-Pomerantz-Test-Bank-28-320.jpg)
![of infuriated antagonists in drunken quarrels, though the relation seemed
almost too horrible to be true. Endeavouring to divert his mind from this
disgusting topic, on which it seemed disposed to linger with ferocious
delight, I made some inquiries relative to his farm—which was, indeed, a
beautiful one, under high culture—and respecting the habits of the prairie-
wolf, a large animal of the species having crossed my path in the prairie in
the gray light of dawn. Upon the latter inquiry the old man sat silent a
moment with his chin leaning on his hands. Looking up at length with an
arch expression, he said, "Stran-ger, I haint no larnin; I can't read; but
don't the Book say somewhere about old Jacob and the ring-streaked
cattle?" "Yes." "Well, and how old Jake's ring-streaked and round-spotted
creeturs, after a leetle, got the better of all the stock, and overrun the
univarsal herd; don't the Book say so?" "Something so." "Well, now for the
wolves: they're all colours but ring-streaked and round-spotted; and if the
sucker-farmers don't look to it, the prairie-wolves will get [71] the better of
all the geese, turkeys, and hins in the barnyard, speckled or no!"
My breakfast was now on the table; a substantial fare of corn-bread,
butter, honey, fresh eggs, fowl, and coffee, which latter are as invariably
visitants at an Illinois table as is bacon at a Kentucky one, and that is
saying no little. The exhilarating herb tea is rarely seen. An anecdote will
illustrate this matter. A young man, journeying in Illinois, stopped one
evening at a log cabin with a violent headache, and requested that never-
failing antidote, a cup of tea. There was none in the house; and, having
despatched a boy to a distant grocery to procure a pound, he threw himself
upon the bed. In a few hours a beverage was handed him, the first swallow
of which nearly excoriated his mouth and throat. In the agony of the
moment he dashed down the bowl, and rushed half blinded to the
fireplace. Over the blaze was suspended a huge iron kettle, half filled with
an inky fluid, seething, and boiling, and bubbling, like the witches' caldron
of unutterable things in Macbeth. The good old lady, in her anxiety to give
her sick guest a strong dish of tea, having never seen the like herself or
drank thereof, and supposing it something of the nature of soup, very
innocently and ignorantly poured the whole pound into her largest kettle,
and set it a boiling. Poultry is the other standing dish of Illinois; and the
poor birds seem to realize that their destiny is at hand whenever a traveller
draws nigh, for they invariably hide their heads beneath the nearest covert.
Indeed, so invariably are poultry and bacon visitants at an Illinois table,
that [72] the story may be true, that the first inquiry made of the guest by
the village landlord is the following: "Well, stran-ger, what'll ye take: wheat-](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/21663-250407213952-e43b07d2/85/Clinical-Psychology-Science-Practice-and-Culture-4th-Edition-Pomerantz-Test-Bank-29-320.jpg)
![XXIX
"Ay, but to die, and go we know not
where!"
Measure for
Measure.
"Plains immense, interminable meads,
And vast savannas, where the wand'ring
eye,
Unfix'd, is in a verdant ocean lost."
Thomson.
"Ye shall have miracles; ay, sound ones
too,
Seen, heard, attested, everything but
true."
Moore.
"Call in the barber! If the tale be long,
He'll cut it short, I trust."
Middleton.
There are few sentiments of that great man Benjamin Franklin for which
he is more to be revered than for those respecting the burial-place of the
departed.197 The grave-yard is, and should ever be deemed, a holy spot;
consecrated, not by the cold formalities of unmeaning ceremony, but by the
solemn sacredness of the heart. Who that has committed to earth's cold
bosom the relics of one dearer, perchance, than existence, can ever after
pass the burial-ground with a careless heart. There is nothing which more
painfully jars upon my own feelings—if I may except that wanton
desecration of God's sanctuary in some sections of our land [74] for a
public commitia—than to see the grave-yard slighted and abused. It is like
wounding the memory of a buried friend. And yet it is an assertion which
cannot be refuted, that, notwithstanding the reverence which, as a people,
we have failed not to manifest for the memory of our dead, the same](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/21663-250407213952-e43b07d2/85/Clinical-Psychology-Science-Practice-and-Culture-4th-Edition-Pomerantz-Test-Bank-31-320.jpg)
![delicate regard and obsequy is not with us observed in the sacred rites as
among the inhabitants of the Eastern hemisphere. If, indeed, we may be
permitted to gather up an opinion from circumstances of daily notoriety, it
would seem that the plat of ground appropriated as a cemetery in many of
the villages of our land was devoted to this most holy of purposes solely
because useless for every other; as if, after seizing upon every spot for the
benefit of the living, this last poor remnant was reluctantly yielded as a
resting-place for the departed. And thus has it happened that most of the
burial-grounds of our land have either been located in a region so lone and
solitary,
"You scarce would start to meet a spirit
there,"
or they have been thrust out into the very midst of business, strife, and
contention; amid the glare of sunshine, noise, and dust; "the gaudy,
babbling, and remorseless day," with hardly a wall of stones to protect
them from the inroads of unruly brutes or brutish men. It is as if the rites
of sepulture were refused, and the poor boon of a resting-place in the
bosom of our common mother denied to her offspring; as if, in our avarice
of soul, we grudged even the last narrow house destined for all; and [75]
fain would resume the last, the only gift our departed ones may retain.
Who would not dread "to die" and have his lifeless clay deposited thus!
Who would not, ere the last fleeting particle of existence had "ebbed to its
finish," and the feeble breathing had forsaken its tenement for ever, pour
forth the anguish of his spirit in the melancholy prayer,
"When breath and sense have left this
clay,
In yon damp vault, oh lay me not!
But kindly bear my bones away
To some lone, green, and sunny spot."
Reverence for the departed is ever a beautiful feature of humanity, and
has struck us with admiration for nations of our race who could boast but
few redeeming traits beside. It is, moreover, a circumstance not a little
remarkable in the history of funeral obsequy, that veneration for the
departed has prevailed in a ratio almost inverse to the degree of civilization.
Without attempting to account for this circumstance, or to instance the
multitude of examples which recur to every mind in its illustration, I would](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/21663-250407213952-e43b07d2/85/Clinical-Psychology-Science-Practice-and-Culture-4th-Edition-Pomerantz-Test-Bank-32-320.jpg)
![only refer to that deep religion of the soul which Nature has implanted in
the heart of her simple child of the Western forests, teaching him to
preserve and to honour the bones of his fathers! And those mysterious
mausoleums of a former race! do they convey no meaning as they rise in
lonely grandeur from our beautiful prairies, and look down upon the noble
streams which for ages have dashed their dark floods along their base!
[76] But a few years have passed away since this empire valley of the
West was first pressed by the footstep of civilized man; and, if we except
those aged sepulchres of the past, the cities of the dead hardly yet range
side by side with the cities of the living. But this cannot always be; even in
this distant, beautiful land, death must come; and here it doubtless has
come, as many an anguished bosom can witness. Is it not, then, meet,
while the busy tide of worldly enterprise is rolling heavily forth over this fair
land, and the costly structures of art and opulence are rising on every side,
as by the enchantment of Arabian fiction—is it not meet that, amid the
pauses of excitement, a solitary thought would linger around that spot,
which must surely, reader, become the last resting-place of us all!
I have often, in my wanderings through this pleasant land, experienced a
thrill of delight which I can hardly describe, to behold, on entering a little
Western hamlet, a neat white paling rising up beneath the groves in some
green, sequestered spot, whose object none could mistake. Upon some of
these, simple as they were, seemed to have been bestowed more than
ordinary care; for they betrayed an elaborateness of workmanship and a
delicacy of design sought for in vain among the ruder habitations of the
living. This is, surely, as it should be; and I pity the man whose feelings
cannot appreciate such a touching, beautiful expression of the heart. I have
alluded to Franklin, and how pleasant it is to detect the kindly, household
emotions of our nature throbbing beneath the [77] starred, dignified breast
of philosophy and science. Franklin, the statesman, the sage; he who
turned the red lightnings from their wild pathway through the skies, and
rocked the iron cradle of the mightiest democracy on the globe! we gaze
upon him with awe and astonishment; involuntarily we yield the lofty motto
presented by the illustrious Frenchman,198 "Eripuit fulmen cœlo, mox
sceptra tyrannis." But when we behold that towering intellect descending
from its throne, and intermingling its emotions even with those of the
lowliest mind, admiration and reverence are lost in love.
The preceding remarks, which have lengthened out themselves far
beyond my design, were suggested by the loveliness of the site of the](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/21663-250407213952-e43b07d2/85/Clinical-Psychology-Science-Practice-and-Culture-4th-Edition-Pomerantz-Test-Bank-33-320.jpg)
![graveyard of the little village of Decatur. I was struck with its beauty on
entering the place. It was near sunset; in the distance slept the quiet
hamlet; upon my right, beneath the grove, peeped out the white paling
through the glossy foliage; and as the broad, deep shadows of summer
evening streamed lengthening through the trees wide over the landscape,
that little spot seemed to my mind the sweetest one in the scene. And
should not the burial-ground be ever thus! for who shall tell the emotions
which may swell the bosom of many a dying emigrant who here shall find
his long, last rest? In that chill hour, how will the thought of home, kindred,
friendships, childhood-scenes, come rushing over the memory! and to lay
his bones in the [78] quiet graveyard of his own native village, perchance
may draw forth many a sorrowing sigh. But this now may never be; yet it
will be consoling to the pilgrim-heart to realize that, though the
resurrection morn shall find his relics far from the graves of his fathers, he
shall yet sleep the long slumber, and at last come forth with those who
were kind and near to him in a stranger-land; who laid away his cold clay in
no "Potter's Field," but gathered it to their own household sepulchre. The
human mind, whatever its philosophy, can never utterly divest itself of the
idea that the spirit retains a consciousness of the lifeless body,
sympathizing with its honour or neglect, and affected by all that variety of
circumstance which may attend its existence: and who shall say how far
this belief—superstition though it be—may smooth or trouble the dying
pillow! How soothing, too, the reflection to the sorrow of distant friends,
that their departed one peacefully and decently was gathered to his rest;
that his dust is sleeping quietly in some sweet, lonely spot beneath the
dark groves of the far-land; that his turf is often dewed by the teardrop of
sympathy, and around his lowly headstone waves the wild-grass ever green
and free! The son, the brother, the loved wanderer from his father's home,
"Is in his grave!
After life's fitful fever, he sleeps well."
The route leading to Decatur from the west lies chiefly through a broad
branch of the "Grand Prairie," an immense plain, sweeping diagonally, with
[79] little interruption, through the whole State of Illinois, from the
Mississippi to the Wabash. For the first time, in any considerable number, I
here met with those singular granite masses, termed familiarly by the
settlers "lost rocks"; in geology, boulders. They are usually of a
mammillated, globular figure, the surface perfectly smooth, sometimes six](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/21663-250407213952-e43b07d2/85/Clinical-Psychology-Science-Practice-and-Culture-4th-Edition-Pomerantz-Test-Bank-34-320.jpg)
![hundred tons in weight, and always lying completely isolated, frequently
some hundred miles from a quarry. They rest upon the surface or are
slightly imbedded in the soil; and, so far as my own observation extends,
are of distinct granitic formation, of various density and composition.
Several specimens I obtained are as heavy as metal, and doubtless contain
iron. Many of them, however, like those round masses dug from the ancient
works in Ohio, are pyritous in character. There is a mystery about these
"lost rocks" not easily solved, for no granite quarry has ever yet been
discovered in Illinois. Their appearance, in the midst of a vast prairie, is
dreary and lonely enough.
The site of the town of Decatur is somewhat depressed, and in the heart
of a grove of noble oaks.199 Long before the traveller reaches it, the whole
village is placed before his eye from the rounded summit of the hill, over
which winds the road. The neighbouring region is well settled; the prairie
high and rolling, and timber abundant. It is not a large place, however; and
perhaps there are few circumstances which will render it otherwise for
some years. It contains, nevertheless, a few handsome buildings; several
trading establishments; a good tavern; is said to be healthy; and, upon the
whole, is a far [80] prettier, neater little village than many others of loftier
pretensions through which I have passed in Illinois. The village will be
intersected by two of the principal railroads of the state, now projected,
which circumstance cannot fail to place it in the first rank as an inland
trading town.
My visit at Decatur was a short one; and, after tea, just as the moon was
beginning to silver the tops of the eastern oaks, I left the village and rode
leisurely through the forest, in order to enter upon the prairie at dawn the
following day. A short distance from Decatur I again forded the Sangamon;
the same insignificant stream as ever; and, by dint of scrambling,
succeeded in attaining the lofty summit of its opposite bank, from which
the surrounding scenery of rolling forest-tops was magnificent and sublime.
From this elevation the pathway plunged into a thick grove, dark as Erebus,
save where lighted up by a few pale moonbeams struggling through a
break in the tree-tops, or the deep-red gleamings of the evening sky
streaming at intervals along the undergrowth. The hour was a calm and
impressive one: its very loneliness made it sweeter; and that beautiful
hymn of the Tyrolean peasantry at sunset, as versified by Mrs. Hemans,
was forcibly recalled by the scene:](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/21663-250407213952-e43b07d2/85/Clinical-Psychology-Science-Practice-and-Culture-4th-Edition-Pomerantz-Test-Bank-35-320.jpg)
!["Come to the sunset tree!
The day is past and gone;
The woodman's axe lies free,
And the reaper's work is done.
Sweet is the hour of rest!
Pleasant the wood's low sigh,
And the gleaming of the west,
And the turf whereon we lie."
[81] After a ride of a few miles my path suddenly emerged from
the forest upon the edge of a boundless prairie, from whose dark-
rolling herbage, here and there along the distant swells, was thrown
back the glorious moonlight, as if from the restless, heaving bosom
of the deep. An extensive prairie, beneath a full burst of summer
moonlight, is, indeed, a magnificent spectacle. One can hardly
persuade himself that he is not upon the ocean-shore. And now a
wild, fresh breeze, which all the day had been out playing among
the perfumed flowers and riding the green-crested waves, came
rolling in from the prairie, producing an undulation of its surface and
a murmuring in the heavy forest-boughs perfect in the illusion. All
along the low, distant horizon hung a thin mist of silvery gauze,
which, as it rose and fell upon the dark herbage, gave an idea of
mysterious boundlessness to the scene. Here and there stood out a
lonely, weather-beaten tree upon the plain, its trunk shrouded in
obscurity, but its leafy top sighing in the night-breeze, and gleaming
like a beacon-light in the beams of the cloudless moon. There was a
dash of fascinating romance about the scene, which held me
involuntarily upon the spot until reminded by the chill dews of night
that I had, as yet, no shelter. On casting around my eye, I perceived
a low log cabin, half buried in vegetation, standing alone in the skirt
of the wood. Although a miserable tenement, necessity compelled
me to accept its hospitality, and I entered. It consisted of a single
apartment, in which two beds, two stools, a cross-legged deal table,
[82] and a rough clothes-press, were the only household furniture. A
few indispensable iron utensils sat near the fire; the water-pail and](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/21663-250407213952-e43b07d2/85/Clinical-Psychology-Science-Practice-and-Culture-4th-Edition-Pomerantz-Test-Bank-36-320.jpg)
![gourd stood upon the shelf, and a half-consumed flitch of bacon
hung suspended in the chimney; but the superlatives of andirons,
shovel and tongs, etc., etc., were all unknown in this primitive
abode. A pair of "lost rocks"—lost, indeed—supplied the first, and
the gnarled branch of an oak was substituted for the latter. The huge
old chimney and fireplace were, as usual, fashioned of sticks and
bedaubed with clay; yet everything looked neat, yea, comfortable, in
very despite of poverty itself. A young female with her child, an
infant boy, in her arms, was superintending the preparation of the
evening meal. Her language and demeanour were superior to the
miserable circumstances by which she was surrounded; and though
she moved about her narrow demesne with a quiet, satisfied air, I
was not long in learning that affection alone had transplanted this
exotic of the prairie from a more congenial soil. What woman does
not love to tell over those passages of her history in which the heart
has ruled lord of the ascendant? and how very different in this
respect is our sex from hers! Man, proud man, "the creature of
interest and ambition," often blushes to be reminded that he has a
heart, while woman's cheek mantles with the very intensity of its
pulsation! The husband in a few minutes came in from attending to
my horse; the rough table was spread; a humble fare was produced;
all were seated; and then, beneath that miserable roof, [83] around
that meager board, before a morsel of the food, poor as it was,
passed the lip of an individual, the iron hand of toil was reverently
raised, and a grateful heart called down a blessing from the
Mightiest! Ah! thought I, as I beheld the peaceful, satisfied air of
that poor man, as he partook of his humble evening meal with
gratefulness, little does the son of luxury know the calm
contentment which fills his breast! And the great God, as he looks
down upon his children and reads their hearts, does he not listen to
many a warmer, purer thank-offering from beneath the lowly roof-
tree of the wilderness, than from all the palaces of opulence and
pride? So it has ever been—so it has ever been—and so can it never
cease to be while the heart of man remains attempered as it is.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/21663-250407213952-e43b07d2/85/Clinical-Psychology-Science-Practice-and-Culture-4th-Edition-Pomerantz-Test-Bank-37-320.jpg)
![The humble repast was soon over; and, without difficulty, I
entered into conversation with the father of the family. He informed
me that he had been but a few years a resident of Illinois; that he
had been unfortunate; and that, recently, his circumstances had
become more than usually circumscribed, from his endeavours to
save from speculators a pre-emption right of the small farm he was
cultivating. This farm was his all; and, in his solicitude to retain its
possession, he had disposed of every article of the household which
would in any way produce money, even of a part of his own and his
wife's wardrobe. I found him a man of considerable intelligence, and
he imparted to me some facts respecting that singular sect styling
themselves Mormonites of which I was previously hardly aware.
Immense [84] crowds of these people had passed his door on the
great road from Terre Haute, all with families and household effects
stowed away in little one-horse wagons of peculiar construction, and
on their journey to Mount Zion, the New Jerusalem, situated near
Independence, Jackson county, Missouri! Their observance of the
Sabbath was almost pharisaically severe, never permitting
themselves to travel upon that day; the men devoting it to hunting,
and the females to washing clothes, and other operations of the
camp! It was their custom, likewise, to hold a preachment in every
village or settlement, whether men would hear or forbear: the latter
must have been the case with something of a majority, I think, since
no one with whom I have ever met could, for the life of him, give a
subsequent expose of Mormonism, "though often requested."
"I never heard or could
engage
A person yet by prayers, or bribes, or
tears,
To name, define by speech, or
write on page,
The doctrines meant precisely by that
word,
Which surely is exceedingly absurd."](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/21663-250407213952-e43b07d2/85/Clinical-Psychology-Science-Practice-and-Culture-4th-Edition-Pomerantz-Test-Bank-38-320.jpg)
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- 5. Chapter 10: Personality Assessment and Behavioral Assessment Test Bank Multiple Choice 1. ____, which is more likely to take place when clinical psychologists are not culturally competent, involves viewing as abnormal that which is normal within the client’s own culture. A. Overpathologizing B. Empirical criterion keying C. Diagnosing D. Multimethod assessment Ans: A Learning Objective: 10.2 Propose how a psychologist conducting a personality assessment can demonstrate cultural competence. Cognitive Domain: Knowledge Answer Location: Culturally Competent Assessment Difficulty Level: Easy 2. The practice of using a collection of different assessment instruments (e.g., interview data, direct observation, etc.) to examine an individual’s personality is known as _____. A. multimodal assessment B. multimethod assessment C. bimodal assessment D. bimethod assessment Ans: B Learning Objective: 10.1 List the advantages of a multimethod assessment approach when conducting a psychological evaluation. Cognitive Domain: Knowledge Answer Location: Multimethod Assessment Difficulty Level: Easy 3. Clinical psychologists who select assessment methods that have strong validity, reliability, and clinical utility are practicing _____. A. multimodal assessment B. culturally competent assessment C. evidence-based assessment D. testing Ans: C Learning Objective: 10.1 List the advantages of a multimethod assessment approach when conducting a psychological evaluation.
- 6. Cognitive Domain: Knowledge Answer Location: Evidence-Based Assessment Difficulty Level: Easy 4. Dr. Johnson is asked to assess Martha. He decides he will administer the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-5 because he knows it is well supported by research. In this situation, Dr. Johnson is practicing A. multimethod assessment. B. culturally competent assessment. C. evidence-based assessment. D. ethically validated assessment. Ans: C Learning Objective: 10.1 List the advantages of a multimethod assessment approach when conducting a psychological evaluation. Cognitive Domain: Application Answer Location: Evidence-Based Assessment Difficulty Level: Medium 5. _____ include unambiguous test items, offer clients a limited range of responses, and have clear scoring guidelines. A. Projective personality tests B. Objective personality tests C. Sentence completion tests D. Naturalistic observation techniques Ans: B Learning Objective: 10.3 Differentiate between objective and projective assessments of personality. Cognitive Domain: Knowledge Answer Location: Objective Personality Tests Difficulty Level: Medium 6. Which of the following is an example of an objective personality test? A. Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory B. Rorschach Inkblot Method C. Thematic Apperception Test D. Person-Tree-House Technique Ans: A Learning Objective: 10.3 Differentiate between objective and projective assessments of personality. 10.4 Identify objective personality tests commonly used by clinical psychologists. Cognitive Domain: Application Answer Location: Objective Personality Tests Difficulty Level: Medium 7. Which of the following is NOT an example of an objective personality test? A. California Psychological Inventory
- 7. B. NEO Personality Inventory C. Thematic Apperception Test D. Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory Ans: C Learning Objective: 10.3 Differentiate between objective and projective assessments of personality. 10.4 Identify objective personality tests commonly used by clinical psychologists. Cognitive Domain: Application Answer Location: Objective Personality Tests Difficulty Level: Medium 8. The _____ is the most popular and psychometrically sound objective personality test used by clinical psychologists. A. Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory-IV B. California Psychological Inventory C. Beck Depression Inventory-II D. Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-II Ans: D Learning Objective: 10.4 Identify objective personality tests commonly used by clinical psychologists. Cognitive Domain: Knowledge Answer Location: Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 Difficulty Level: Easy 9. _____ is a test-construction method that involves identifying distinct groups of people, asking all of them to respond to the same test items, and comparing responses between the groups. A. Empirical criterion keying B. Logarithmic modeling C. Factor analysis D. Comparative group coding Ans: A Learning Objective: 10.4 Identify objective personality tests commonly used by clinical psychologists. Cognitive Domain: Knowledge Answer Location: Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 Difficulty Level: Easy 10. Who are Starke Hathaway and J. C. McKinley? A. Authors of the original MMPI B. Developers of the most widely used scoring system for the Rorschach Inkblot Method C. Creators of the Thematic Apperception Test D. Authors of the NEO Personality Inventory Ans: A Learning Objective: 10.4 Identify objective personality tests commonly used by clinical psychologists. Cognitive Domain: Knowledge
- 8. Answer Location: Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 Difficulty Level: Medium 11. The original MMPI and the MMPI-2 both feature _____ clinical scales. A. 2 B. 5 C. 10 D. 30 Ans: C Learning Objective: 10.4 Identify objective personality tests commonly used by clinical psychologists. Cognitive Domain: Knowledge Answer Location: Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 Difficulty Level: Medium 12. Which of the following is not a clinical scale on the MMPI and MMPI-2? A. Depression B. Mania C. Paranoia D. Self-Acceptance Ans: D Learning Objective: 10.4 Identify objective personality tests commonly used by clinical psychologists. Cognitive Domain: Comprehension Answer Location: Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 Difficulty Level: Hard 13. A client who scores very high on the clinical scale called “Psychopathic Deviate” on the MMPI-2 is most likely to receive a diagnosis of _____. A. major depressive disorder B. antisocial personality disorder C. borderline personality disorder D. specific phobia Ans: B Learning Objective: 10.4 Identify objective personality tests commonly used by clinical psychologists. Cognitive Domain: Application Answer Location: Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 Difficulty Level: Hard 14. A client who scores very high on the clinical scale called “Psychasthenia” on the MMPI-2 is most like to receive a diagnosis of _____. A. generalized anxiety disorder B. bulimia nervosa C. borderline personality disorder
- 9. D. schizophrenia Ans: A Learning Objective: 10.4 Identify objective personality tests commonly used by clinical psychologists. Cognitive Domain: Application Answer Location: Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 Difficulty Level: Hard 15. The Psychasthenia scale on the MMPI-2 is a measure of _____. A. depression B. anxiety C. bipolar disorder D. schizophrenia Ans: B Learning Objective: 10.4 Identify objective personality tests commonly used by clinical psychologists. Cognitive Domain: Knowledge Answer Location: Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 Difficulty Level: Medium 16. The validity scales of the MMPI-2 are a measure of _____. A. the test-taking attitudes of the client B. depression C. anxiety D. antisocial tendencies Ans: A Learning Objective: 10.4 Identify objective personality tests commonly used by clinical psychologists. Cognitive Domain: Knowledge Answer Location: Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 Difficulty Level: Easy 17. Barak completes the MMPI-2. His results produce a highly elevated K scale score. A clinical psychologist interpreting this score should conclude that Barak is A. lying. B. “faking bad.” C. “faking good.” D. responding infrequently. Ans: C Learning Objective: 10.4 Identify objective personality tests commonly used by clinical psychologists. Cognitive Domain: Application Answer Location: Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 Difficulty Level: Hard 18. The MMPI-A is an
- 10. A. alternate form of the MMPI-2 intended for adults who have previously taken the test. B. auditory version of the MMPI-2 intended for individuals whose reading level falls below the demands of the test. C. abbreviated form of the MMPI-2 with approximately half the items of the MMPI-2. D. adolescent version of the MMPI-2 intended for clients aged 14–18 years. Ans: D Learning Objective: 10.4 Identify objective personality tests commonly used by clinical psychologists. Cognitive Domain: Knowledge Answer Location: Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 Difficulty Level: Medium 19. Which of the following statements is NOT true? A. The validity and reliability of the MMPI-2 have been examined in thousands of studies. B. A shorter version of the MMPI-2 is the MMPI-2 Brief Inventory (MMPI-2-BI). C. Both the MMPI-2 and MMPI-A have 10 clinical scales. D. In addition to clinical scales, the MMPI-2 also has supplemental and content scales. Ans: B Learning Objective: 10.4 Identify objective personality tests commonly used by clinical psychologists. Cognitive Domain: Comprehension Answer Location: Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 Difficulty Level: Medium 20. The _____is a new, shorter version of the MMPI-2 released in 2008. A. MMPI-3 B. MMPI-A C. MMPI-2-RF D. MMPI-Mini Ans: C Learning Objective: 10.4 Identify objective personality tests commonly used by clinical psychologists. Cognitive Domain: Knowledge Answer Location: Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 Difficulty Level: Medium 21. Dr. Richards uses psychological testing, including feedback about testing results, both to assess his patients and to provide a brief therapeutic intervention. This practice is best described as A. therapeutic assessment. B. cognitive-behavioral assessment. C. clinical assessment. D. personality assessment. Ans: A Learning Objective: 10.4 Identify objective personality tests commonly used by clinical psychologists. Cognitive Domain: Knowledge
- 11. Answer Location: Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 Difficulty Level: Medium 22. The Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory-IV (MCMI-IV) emphasizes _____. A. personality disorders B. psychotic disorders C. normal personality traits D. nonverbal intelligence Ans: A Learning Objective: 10.4 Identify objective personality tests commonly used by clinical psychologists. Cognitive Domain: Knowledge Answer Location: Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory-IV Difficulty Level: Medium 23. Theodore Millon is A. the lead member of the DSM-5 anxiety disorders Work Group. B. the creator of the MCMI. C. a leading intelligence assessment researcher. D. the son of Rolland Millon, the primary author of the first DSM. Ans: B Learning Objective: 10.4 Identify objective personality tests commonly used by clinical psychologists. Cognitive Domain: Knowledge Answer Location: Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory-IV Difficulty Level: Easy 24. The NEO-Personality Inventory-Revised (NEO-PI-R) was created by _____. A. Theodore Millon B. Starke Hathaway and J. C. McKinley C. Paul Costa and Robert McCrae D. Aaron Beck Ans: C Learning Objective: 10.4 Identify objective personality tests commonly used by clinical psychologists. Cognitive Domain: Knowledge Answer Location: NEO Personality Inventory-Revised Difficulty Level: Easy 25. The NEO-Personality Inventory-Revised (NEO-PI-R) emphasizes _____. A. personality disorders B. mood disorders C. psychotic disorders D. normal personality traits Ans: D
- 12. Learning Objective: 10.4 Identify objective personality tests commonly used by clinical psychologists. Cognitive Domain: Knowledge Answer Location: NEO Personality Inventory-Revised Difficulty Level: Easy 26. Which of the following is NOT one of the “Big Five” personality traits measured by the NEO Personality Inventory? A. Neuroticism B. Conscientiousness C. Openness D. Eclecticism Ans: D Learning Objective: 10.4 Identify objective personality tests commonly used by clinical psychologists. Cognitive Domain: Comprehension Answer Location: NEO Personality Inventory-Revised Difficulty Level: Medium 27. Which of the following statements is NOT true? A. The CPI emphasizes positive attributes of personality. B. The CPI is consistent with the growing movement within the mental health field toward positive psychology. C. The CPI is widely used in industrial/organizational contexts. D. The CPI-III yields scores on scales such as Derangement, Anxiety, and Apathy. Ans: D Learning Objective: 10.4 Identify objective personality tests commonly used by clinical psychologists. Cognitive Domain: Comprehension Answer Location: California Psychological Inventory Difficulty Level: Medium 28. Unlike lengthier personality tests that provide a broad overview of personality, the _____ is briefer and more targeted toward a single characteristic. A. Rorschach Inkblot Method B. NEO-Personality Inventory-Revised C. Beck Depression Inventory-II D. Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 Ans: C Learning Objective: 10.4 Identify objective personality tests commonly used by clinical psychologists. Cognitive Domain: Comprehension Answer Location: Beck Depression Inventory-II Difficulty Level: Medium 29. The Rorschach Inkblot Method A. contains a total of 10 inkblots. B. is an objective personality test.
- 13. C. was created after the creation of the original MMPI. D. features inkblots created by John Exner. Ans: A Learning Objective: 10.5 Describe major projective personality tests used for psychological assessment. Cognitive Domain: Comprehension Answer Location: Rorschach Inkblot Method Difficulty Level: Medium 30. The most frequently cited shortcoming of projective personality tests centers on the fact that projective personality tests A. typically take much longer to administer than objective personality tests. B. cannot be used with child clients. C. rely more heavily on the psychologist’s unique way of scoring and interpreting results than objective tests, which limits their reliability and validity. D. force clients into a restricted range of responses to a greater extent than objective personality tests. Ans: C Learning Objective: 10.5 Describe major projective personality tests used for psychological assessment. Cognitive Domain: Comprehension Answer Location: Projective Personality Tests Difficulty Level: Medium 31. _____ created a comprehensive scoring system for the Rorschach Inkblot Method. A. Herman Rorschach B. John Exner C. Aaron Beck D. Theodore Millon Ans: B Learning Objective: 10.5 Describe major projective personality tests used for psychological assessment. Cognitive Domain: Knowledge Answer Location: Rorschach Inkblot Method Difficulty Level: Easy 32. In the _____, the task of the client is to create a story to go along with the interpersonal scenes depicted in cards. A. Rorschach Inkblot Method B. California Psychological Inventory-III C. Thematic Apperception Test D. NEO Personality Inventory-Revised Ans: C Learning Objective: 10.5 Describe major projective personality tests used for psychological assessment. Cognitive Domain: Knowledge Answer Location: Thematic Apperception Test Difficulty Level: Easy
- 14. 33. As part of an assessment, Dr. Bush asks Mary to finish sentence stems printed on a paper, such as “My favorite …” and “I feel afraid …” This assessment technique is known as a A. sentence completion test, an objective measure of personality. B. sentence completion test, a projective measure of personality. C. narrative casting test, an objective measure of personality. D. narrative casting test, a projective measure of personality. Ans: B Learning Objective: 10.5 Describe major projective personality tests used for psychological assessment. Cognitive Domain: Comprehension Answer Location: Thematic Apperception Test Difficulty Level: Medium 34. Behavioral assessment endorses the notion that A. personality is a stable, internal construct. B. client behaviors are signs of deep-seated, underlying issues or problems. C. assessing personality requires a high degree of inference. D. client behaviors are, themselves, the problem. Ans: D Learning Objective: 10.6 Explain behavioral assessment methods used by clinical psychologists. Cognitive Domain: Comprehension Answer Location: Behavioral Assessment Difficulty Level: Easy 35. Naturalistic observation is most likely to be practiced by a clinical psychologists who endorses A. projective personality tests. B. objective personality tests that emphasize normal personality traits. C. behavioral assessment. D. objective personality tests that emphasize abnormal or psychopathological aspects of personality. Ans: C Learning Objective: 10.6 Explain behavioral assessment methods used by clinical psychologists. Cognitive Domain: Comprehension Answer Location: Methods of Behavioral Assessment Difficulty Level: Easy 36. The practice of evidence-based assessment is characterized by the selection of tests that meet all of the following criteria EXCEPT A. strong clinical utility. B. acceptable reliability and validity. C. sufficient normative data. D. endorsement by the American Psychological Association. Ans: D
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- 16. Learning Objective: 10.1 List the advantages of a multimethod assessment approach when conducting a psychological evaluation. Cognitive Domain: Comprehension Answer Location: Evidence-Based Assessment Difficulty Level: Medium 37. “Therapeutic assessment” A. involves the use of projective personality tests in a deliberately therapeutic way. B. is a practice developed by Stephen Finn and colleagues in which cognitive therapy begins without a formal assessment, with the assumption that the first few sessions of therapy can provide adequate assessment data. C. requires the use of massage to decrease patient nervousness prior to beginning an assessment. D. describes the use of psychological testing and feedback as a brief therapeutic intervention. Ans: D Learning Objective: 10.4 Identify objective personality tests commonly used by clinical psychologists. Cognitive Domain: Knowledge Answer Location: Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 Difficulty Level: Easy Short Answer 1. What is the most popular objective personality test used by clinical psychologists? Ans: Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI-2) 2. What test-construction method was used by the authors of the MMPI-2? Ans: Empirical criterion keying 3. What are the five personality traits measured by the NEO-Personality Inventory? Ans: Neuroticism, extraversion, openness, conscientiousness, and agreeableness. 4. The _____ emphasizes the positive attributes of personality and yields scores on scales such as Independence and Self-Acceptance. Ans: California Psychological Inventory (CPI) 5. What are the two phases of administration for the Rorschach Inkblot Method? Ans: Response/free association, and inquiry 6. During the _____, an adult patient is asked to tell stories about a series of cards, each featuring an ambiguous interpersonal scene. Ans: Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)
- 17. 7. On what type of test might the item “I enjoy _____” appear? Ans: Sentence completion test (or Rotter Incomplete Sentences Blank) 8. _____ is the systematic observation of a patient’s behavior in the natural environment. Ans: Behavioral observation (or naturalistic observation) Essay 1. Briefly explain empirical criterion keying, the method of test construction used by the authors of the MMPI. Ans: Identify distinct groups of people, asking all of them to respond to the same objective test items, and comparing responses between groups. If an item elicits different responses from one group than from another, the item should be retained. If the groups respond similarly to an item, the item should be omitted. It does not matter whether an item should, in theory, differentiate the two groups; it only matters whether an item does, in actuality, differentiate the two groups. 2. Briefly contrast the different emphases (in terms of aspects of personality) of the MMPI-2, MCMI-IV, NEO-PI-R, and CPI. Ans: The MMPI-2 emphasizes psychopathology. The MCMI-IV emphasizes personality disorders. The NEO-PI-R emphasizes normal personality traits. The CPI emphasizes positive attributes of personality such as strengths, assets, and internal resources; it is often employed in industrial/organizational psychology contexts. 3. Why was the MMPI revised, resulting in the MMPI-2? Ans: The revision process addressed several weaknesses that had become increasingly problematic for the original MMPI, including the inadequate normative sample of the original MMPI. For the original MMPI, the “normal” group to which the clinical groups were compared consisted of 724 individuals from Minnesota in the 1940s; this group was overwhelmingly rural and white. For the MMPI-2, normative data was solicited from a much larger and demographically diverse group. Other improvements included the removal or revision of some test items with outdated or awkward wording. 4. How does behavioral assessment differ from the traditional approach personality assessment approach? Ans: The behavioral assessment approach rejects the assumptions that personality is a stable, internal construct; that assessment of personality requires a high degree of inference; and that client behaviors are signs of underlying issues. Instead, behavioral assessment views client behaviors as samples of the problem itself, not signs of underlying problems. Inference should be minimized, so rather than projective or objective measures (all indirect), behavioral assessors prefer direct observation. Also, behavioral assessors emphasize external factors over internal factors as causes of behavior.
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- 19. the cultivated mind [55] always manifests in the operations of mechanical art. Illinois College has been founded but five or six years, yet it is now one of the most flourishing institutions west of the mountains. The library consists of nearly two thousand volumes, and its chymical apparatus is sufficient. The faculty are five in number, and its first class was graduated two years since. No one can doubt the vast influence this seminary is destined to exert, not only upon this beautiful region of country and this state, but over the whole great Western Valley. It owes its origin to the noble enterprise of seven young men, graduates of Yale College, whose names another age will enrol among our Harvards and our Bowdoins, our Holworthys, Elliots, and Gores, great and venerable as those names are. And, surely, we cannot but believe that "some divinity has shaped their ends," when we consider the character of the spot upon which a wise Providence has been pleased to succeed their design. From the Northern lakes to the gulf, where may a more eligible site be designated for an institution whose influence shall be wide, and powerful, and salutary, than that same beautiful grove, in that pleasant village of Jacksonville. To the left of the college buildings is situated the lordly residence of Governor Duncan, surrounded by its extensive grounds.191 There are other fine edifices scattered here and there upon the eminence, among which the beautiful little cottage of Mr. C., brother to the great orator of the [56] West, holds a conspicuous station.192 Society in Jacksonville is said to be superior to any in the state. It is of a cast decidedly moral, and possesses much literary taste. This is betrayed in the number of its schools and churches; its lyceum, circulating library, and periodicals. In fine, there are few spots in the West, and none in Illinois, which to the Northern emigrant present stronger attractions than the town of Jacksonville and its vicinity. Located in the heart of a tract of country the most fertile and beautiful in the state; swept by the sweet breath of health throughout the year; tilled by a race of enterprising, intelligent, hardy yeomen; possessing a moral, refined, and enlightened society, the tired wanderer may here find his necessities relieved and his peculiarities respected: he may here find congeniality of feeling and sympathy of heart. And when his memory wanders, as it sometimes must, with melancholy musings, mayhap, over the loved scenes of his own distant New-England, it will be sweet to realize that, though he sees not, indeed, around him the beautiful romance of his native hills, yet many a kindly heart is throbbing near, whose emotions, like
- 20. his own, were nurtured in their rugged bosom. "Cælum non animum mutatur." And is it indeed true, as they often tell us, that New-England character, like her own ungenial clime, is cold, penurious, and heartless; while to her brethren, from whom she is separated only by an imaginary boundary, may be ascribed all that is lofty, and honourable, and chivalrous in man! This is an old [57] calumny, the offspring of prejudice and ignorance, and it were time it were at rest. But it is not for me to contrast the leading features of Northern character with those of the South, or to repel the aspersions which have been heaped upon either. Yet, reader, believe them not; many are false as ever stained the poisoned lip of slander. It was Saturday evening when I reached the village of Jacksonville, and on the following Sabbath I listened to the sage instruction of that eccentric preacher, but venerable old man, Dr. P. of Philadelphia, since deceased, but then casually present. "The Young Men of the West" was a subject which had been presented him for discourse, and worthily was it elaborated. The good people of this little town, in more features than one, present a faithful transcript of New-England; but in none do they betray their Pilgrim origin more decidedly than in their devotedness to the public worship of the sanctuary. Here the young and the old, the great and small, the rich and poor, are all as steadily church-goers as were ever the pious husbandmen of Connecticut—men of the broad breast and giant stride—in the most "high and palmy day" of blue-laws and tything men. You smile, reader, yet "Noble deeds those iron men have done!" It was these same church-going, psalm-singing husbandmen who planted Liberty's fair tree within our borders, the leaves of which are now for the "healing of the nations," and whose broad branches are overshadowing the earth; and they watered it—ay, watered it with their blood! The Pilgrim Fathers!—[58] the elder yeomanry of New-England!—the Patriots of the American Revolution!—great names! they shall live enshrined in the heart of Liberty long after those of many a railer are as if they had never been. And happy, happy would it be for the fair heritage bequeathed by them, were not the present generation degenerate sons of noble sires. At Jacksonville I tarried only a few days; but during that short period I met with a few things of tramontane origin, strange enough to my Yankee notions. It was the season approaching the annual election of representatives for the state and national councils, and on one of the days
- 21. to which I have alluded the political candidates of various creeds addressed the people; that is—for the benefit of the uninitiated be it stated—each one made manifest what great things he had done for the people in times past, and promised to do greater things, should the dear people, in the overflowing of their kindness, be pleased to let their choice fall upon him. This is a custom of universal prevalence in the Southern and Western states, and much is urged in its support; yet, sure it is, in no way could a Northern candidate more utterly defeat his election than by attempting to pursue the same. The charge of self-electioneering is, indeed, a powerful engine often employed by political partisans. The candidates, upon the occasion of which I am speaking, were six or seven in number: and though I was not permitted to listen to the eloquence of all, some of these harangues are said to have been powerful productions, especially that of Mr. S. The day [59] was exceedingly sultry, and Mr. W., candidate for the state Senate, was on the stump, in shape of a huge meat-block at one corner of the market-house, when I entered.193 He was a broadfaced, farmer-like personage, with features imbrowned by exposure, and hands hardened by honourable toil; with a huge rent, moreover, athwart his left shoulder-blade—a badge of democracy, I presume, and either neglected or produced there for the occasion; much upon the same principle, doubtless, that Quintilian counselled his disciples to disorder the hair and tumble the toga before they began to speak. Now mind ye, reader, I do not accuse the worthy man of having followed the Roman's instructions, or even of acquaintance therewith, or any such thing; but, verily, he did, in all charity, seem to have hung on his worst rigging, and that, too, for no other reason than to demonstrate the democracy aforesaid, and his affection for the sans-culottes. His speech, though garnished with some little rhodomontade, was, upon the whole, a sensible production. I could hardly restrain a smile, however, at one of the worthy man's figures, in which he likened himself to "the morning sun, mounting a stump to scatter the mists which had been gathering around his fair fame." Close upon the heels of this ruse followed a beautiful simile—"a people free as the wild breezes of their own broad prairies!" The candidates alternated according to their political creeds, and denounced each other in no very measured terms. The approaching election was found, indeed, to be the prevailing topic of thought and conversation all over the land; insomuch [60] that the writer, himself an unassuming wayfarer, was more than once, strangely enough, mistaken for a candidate as he rode through the country, and was everywhere catechumened as to the articles of his political faith. It
- 22. would be an amusing thing to a solitary traveller in a country like this, could he always detect the curious surmisings to which his presence gives rise in the minds of those among whom he chances to be thrown; especially so when, from any circumstance, his appearance does not betray his definite rank or calling in life, and anything of mystery hangs around his movements. Internal Improvement seems now to be the order of the day in Northern Illinois. This was the hobby of most of the stump-speakers; and the projected railway from Jacksonville to the river was under sober consideration. I became acquainted, while here, with Mr. C., a young gentleman engaged in laying off the route. It was late in the afternoon when I at length broke away from the hustings, and mounted my horse to pursue my journey to Springfield. The road strikes off from the public square, in a direct line through the prairie, at right angles with that by which I entered, and, like that, ornamented by fine farms. I had rode but a few miles from the village, and was leisurely pursuing my way across the dusty plain, when a quick tramping behind attracted my attention, and in a few moments a little, portly, red-faced man at my side, in linsey-woolsey and a broad-brimmed hat, saluted me frankly with the title of "friend," and forthwith announced himself a "Baptist [61] circuit-rider!" I became much interested in the worthy man before his path diverged from my own; and I flatter myself he reciprocated my regard, for he asked all manner of questions, and related all manner of anecdotes, questioned or not. Among other edifying matter, he gave a full-length biography of a "billards fever" from which he was just recovering; even from the premonitory symptoms thereof to the relapse and final convalescence. At nightfall I found myself alone in the heart of an extensive prairie; but the beautiful crescent had now begun to beam forth from the blue heavens; and the wild, fresh breeze of evening, playing among the silvered grass-tops, rendered the hour a delightful one to the traveller. "Spring Island Grove," a thick wood upon an eminence to the right, looked like a region of fairy-land as its dark foliage trembled in the moonlight. The silence and solitude of the prairie was almost startling; and a Herculean figure upon a white horse, as it drew nigh, passed me "on the other side" with a glance of suspicion at my closely-buttoned surtout and muffled mouth, as if to say, "this is too lone a spot to form acquaintance." A few hours—I had crossed the prairie, and was snugly deposited in a pretty little farmhouse in the edge of the grove, with a crusty, surly fellow enough for its master.
- 24. XXVIII "Hee is a rite gude creetur, and travels all the ground over most faithfully." "The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together."—Shakespeare. It is a trite remark, that few studies are more pleasing to the inquisitive mind than that of the nature of man. But, however this may be, sure it is, few situations in life present greater facilities for watching its developments than that of the ordinary wayfaring traveller. Though I fully agree with Edmund Burke, that "the age of chivalry has passed away," with all its rough virtues and its follies, yet am I convinced that, even in this degenerate era of sophisters, economists, and speculators, when a solitary individual, unconnected with any great movements of the day, throws himself upon his horse, and sallies fearlessly forth upon the arena of the world, whether in quest of adventure or not, he will be quite sure to meet, at least, with some slight "inklings" thereof. A thousand exhibitions of human character will fling themselves athwart his pathway, inconsiderable indeed in themselves, yet which, as days of the year and seconds of the day, go to make up the lineaments of man; and which, from the observation of the pride, and pomp, and circumstance of wealth and equipage, would of necessity be veiled. Under the eye of the solitary [63] wanderer, going forth upon a pilgrimage of observation among the ranks of men—who is met but for once, and whose opinion, favourable or otherwise, can be supposed to exert but trifling influence—there is not that necessity for enveloping those petty weaknesses of our nature in the mantle of selfishness which would, under more imposing circumstances, exist. To the mind of delicate sensibility, unschooled in the ways of man, such exhibitions of human heartlessness might, perchance, be anything but interesting; but to one who, elevated by independence of character above the ordinary contingencies of situation and circumstance, can smile at the frailties of his race, even when exhibited at his own expense, they can but afford a fund of interest and instruction. The youthful student, when with fresh, unblunted feeling he for the first time enters the dissecting-room of medical science, turns with sickened, revolting sensibilities from the
- 25. mutilated form stretched out upon the board before him, while the learned professor, with untrembling nerve, lays bare its secrecies with the crimsoned knife of science. Just so is it with the exhibitions of human nature; yet who will say that dissection of the moral character of man is not as indispensable to an intimate acquaintance with its phenomena, as that of his physical organization for a similar purpose. But, then, there are the brighter features of humanity, which sometimes hang across the wanderer's pathway like the beautiful tints of a summer evening bow; and which, as they are oftenest met reposing beneath the cool, sequestered shades of [64] retirement, where the roar and tumult of a busy world are as the heavy swing of the distant wave, so there, oftener than elsewhere, they serve to cheer the pilgrim traveller's heart. Ah! it is very sweet, from the dull Rembrandt shades of which human character presents but too much, to turn away and dwell upon these green, beautiful spots in the wastes of humanity; these oases in a desert of barrenness; to hope that man, though indeed a depraved, unholy being, is not that thing of utter detestation which a troubled bosom had sometimes forced us to believe. At such moments, worth years of coldness and distrust, how inexpressibly grateful is it to feel the young tendrils of the heart springing forth to meet the proffered affection; curling around our race, and binding it closer and closer to ourselves. But your pardon, reader: my wayward pen has betrayed me into an episode upon poor human nature most unwittingly, I do assure thee. I was only endeavouring to present a few ideas circumstances had casually suggested, which I was sure would commend themselves to every thinking mind, and which some incidents of my wayfaring may serve to illustrate, when lo! forth comes an essay on human nature. It reminds one of Sir Hudibras, who told the clock by algebra, or of Dr. Young's satirised gentlewoman, who drank tea by stratagem. "How little do men realize the loveliness of this visible world!" is an exclamation which has oftentimes involuntarily left my lips while gazing upon the surpassing splendour of a prairie-sunrise. This is at all times a glorious hour, but to a lonely traveller [65] on these beautiful plains of the departed Illini, it comes on with a charm which words are powerless to express. We call our world a Ruin. Ah! it is one in all its moral and physical relations; but, like the elder cities of the Nile, how vast, how magnificent in its desolation! The astronomer, as he wanders with scientific eye along the sparkling galaxy of a summer's night, tells us that among those clustering orbs, far, far away in the clear realms of upper sky, he catches at times a
- 26. glimpse of another world! a region of untold, unutterable brightness! the high empyrean, veiled in mystery! And so is it with our own humbler sphere; the glittering fragment of a world we have never known ofttimes glances before us, and then is gone for ever. Before the dawn I had left the farmhouse where I had passed the night, and was thridding the dark old forest on my route to Springfield. The dusky twilight of morning had been slowly stealing over the landscape; and, just as I emerged once more upon my winding prairie-path, the flaming sunlight was streaming wide and far over the opposite heavens. Along the whole line of eastern horizon reposed the purple dies of morning, shooting rapidly upward into broad pyramidal shafts to the zenith, till at last the dazzling orb came rushing above the plain, bathing the scene in an effulgence of light. The day which succeeded was a fine one, and I journeyed leisurely onward, admiring the mellow glories of woodland and prairie, until near noon, when a flashing cupola above the trees reminded me I was approaching [66] Springfield.194 Owing to its unfavourable situation and the fewness of its public structures, this town, though one of the most important in the state, presents not that imposing aspect to the stranger's eye which some more inconsiderable villages can boast. Its location is the border of an extensive prairie, adorned with excellent farms, and stretching away on every side to the blue line of distant forest. This town, like Jacksonville, was laid out ten or twelve years since, but for a long while contained only a few scattered log cabins: all its present wealth or importance dates from the last six years. Though inferior in many respects to its neighbour and rival, yet such is its location by nature that it can hardly fail of becoming a place of extensive business and crowded population; while its geographically central situation seems to designate it as the capital of the state. An elegant state- house is now erecting, and the seat of government is to be located here in 1840. The public square, a green, pleasant lawn, enclosed by a railing, contains the courthouse and a market, both fine structures of brick: the sides are lined with handsome edifices. Most of the buildings are small, however, and the humble log cabin not unfrequently meets the eye. Among the public structures are a jail, and several houses of worship. Society is said to be excellent, and the place can boast much literary taste. The plan of Internal Improvement projected for the state, when carried out, cannot fail to render Springfield an important place. It was a cool, beautiful evening when I left Springfield and held my way over the prairie, rolling its [67] waving verdure on either side of my path.
- 27. Long after the village had sunk in the horizon, the bright cupola continued to flame in the oblique rays of the setting sun. I passed many extensive farms on my route, and in a few hours had entered the forest and forded Sangamon River—so styled out of pure courtesy, I presume, for at the spot I crossed it seemed little more than a respectable creek, with waters clear as crystal, flowing over clean white sand.195 At periods of higher stages, however, this stream has been navigated nearly to the confluence of its forks, a distance of some hundred miles; and in the spring of 1832 a boat of some size arrived within five miles of Springfield. An inconsiderable expense in removing logs and overhanging trees, it is said, would render this river navigable for keelboats half the year. The advantages of such a communication, through one of the richest agricultural regions on the globe, can hardly be estimated. The Sangamon bottom has a soil of amazing fertility, and rears from its deep, black mould a forest of enormous sycamores; huge, overgrown, unshapely masses, their venerable limbs streaming with moss. When the traveller enters the depths of these dark old woods, a cold chill runs over his frame, and he feels as if he were entering the sepulchre. A cheerless twilight reigns for ever through them: the atmosphere he inhales has an earthly smell, and is filled with floating greenish exhalations; the moist, black mould beneath his horse's hoofs, piled with vegetable decay for many feet, and upon whose festering bosom the cheering light of day has not smiled for [68] centuries, is rank and yielding: the enormous shafts leaning in all attitudes, their naked old roots enveloped in a green moss of velvet luxuriance, tower a hundred feet above his head, and shut out the heavens from his view: the huge wild- vine leaps forth at their foot and clasps them in its deadly embrace; or the tender ivy and pensile woodbine cluster around the aged giants, and strive to veil with their mantling tapestry the ravages of time. There is much cathedral pomp, much of Gothic magnificence about all this; and one can hardly fling off from his mind the awe and solemnity which gathers over it amid the chill, silent, and mysterious solitude of the scene. Emerging from the river-bottom, my pathway lay along a tract of elevated land, among beautiful forest-glades of stately oaks, through whose long dim aisles the yellow beams of summer sunset were now richly streaming. Once more upon the broad prairie, and the fragment of an iris was glittering in the eastern heavens: turning back, my eye caught a view of that singular but splendid phenomenon, seldom witnessed—a heavy, distant rain-shower between the spectator and the departing sun.
- 28. Nightfall found me at the residence of Mr. D., an intelligent, gentlemanly farmer, with whom I passed an agreeable evening. I was not long in discovering that my host was a candidate for civic honours; and that he, with his friend Mr. L., whose speech I had subsequently the pleasure of perusing, had just returned from Mechanicsburg,196 a small village in the vicinity, where they had been exerting themselves upon the stump to win the aura popularis for the coming election. "Sic itur ad astra!" [69] Before sunrise I had crossed the threshold of my hospitable entertainer; and having wound my solitary way, partially by twilight, over a prairie fifteen miles in extent, "Began to feel, as well I might, The keen demands of appetite." Reining up my tired steed at the door of a log cabin in the middle of the plain, the nature and extent of my necessities were soon made known to an aged matron, who had come forth on my approach. "Some victuals you shall get, stran-ger; but you'll just take your creetur to the crib and gin him his feed; bekase, d'ye see, the old man is kind o' drinkin to-day; yester' was 'lection, ye know." From the depths of my sympathetic emotions was I moved for the poor old body, who with most dolorous aspect had delivered herself of this message; and I had proceeded forthwith, agreeable to instructions, to satisfy the cravings of my patient animal, when who should appear but my tipsified host, in propria persona, at the door. The little old gentleman came tottering towards the spot where I stood, and, warmly squeezing my hand, whispered to me, with a most irresistible serio-comic air, "that he was drunk;" and "that he was four hours last night getting home from 'lection," as he called it. "Now, stran-ger, you won't think hard on me," he continued, in his maudlin manner: "I'm a poor, drunken old fellow! but old Jim wan't al'ays so; old Jim wan't al'ays so!" he exclaimed, with bitterness, burying his face in his toilworn hands, as, having now regained the house, he seated himself with difficulty upon the [70] doorstep. "Once, my son, old Jim could knock down, drag out, whip, lift, or throw any man in all Sangamon, if he was a leetle fellow: but now— there's the receipt of his disgrace—there," he exclaimed, with vehemence, thrusting forth before my eyes two brawny, gladiator arms, in which the volumed muscles were heaving and contracting with excitement; ironed by labour, but shockingly mutilated. Expressing astonishment at the spectacle, he assured me that these wounds had been torn in the flesh by the teeth
- 29. of infuriated antagonists in drunken quarrels, though the relation seemed almost too horrible to be true. Endeavouring to divert his mind from this disgusting topic, on which it seemed disposed to linger with ferocious delight, I made some inquiries relative to his farm—which was, indeed, a beautiful one, under high culture—and respecting the habits of the prairie- wolf, a large animal of the species having crossed my path in the prairie in the gray light of dawn. Upon the latter inquiry the old man sat silent a moment with his chin leaning on his hands. Looking up at length with an arch expression, he said, "Stran-ger, I haint no larnin; I can't read; but don't the Book say somewhere about old Jacob and the ring-streaked cattle?" "Yes." "Well, and how old Jake's ring-streaked and round-spotted creeturs, after a leetle, got the better of all the stock, and overrun the univarsal herd; don't the Book say so?" "Something so." "Well, now for the wolves: they're all colours but ring-streaked and round-spotted; and if the sucker-farmers don't look to it, the prairie-wolves will get [71] the better of all the geese, turkeys, and hins in the barnyard, speckled or no!" My breakfast was now on the table; a substantial fare of corn-bread, butter, honey, fresh eggs, fowl, and coffee, which latter are as invariably visitants at an Illinois table as is bacon at a Kentucky one, and that is saying no little. The exhilarating herb tea is rarely seen. An anecdote will illustrate this matter. A young man, journeying in Illinois, stopped one evening at a log cabin with a violent headache, and requested that never- failing antidote, a cup of tea. There was none in the house; and, having despatched a boy to a distant grocery to procure a pound, he threw himself upon the bed. In a few hours a beverage was handed him, the first swallow of which nearly excoriated his mouth and throat. In the agony of the moment he dashed down the bowl, and rushed half blinded to the fireplace. Over the blaze was suspended a huge iron kettle, half filled with an inky fluid, seething, and boiling, and bubbling, like the witches' caldron of unutterable things in Macbeth. The good old lady, in her anxiety to give her sick guest a strong dish of tea, having never seen the like herself or drank thereof, and supposing it something of the nature of soup, very innocently and ignorantly poured the whole pound into her largest kettle, and set it a boiling. Poultry is the other standing dish of Illinois; and the poor birds seem to realize that their destiny is at hand whenever a traveller draws nigh, for they invariably hide their heads beneath the nearest covert. Indeed, so invariably are poultry and bacon visitants at an Illinois table, that [72] the story may be true, that the first inquiry made of the guest by the village landlord is the following: "Well, stran-ger, what'll ye take: wheat-
- 30. bread and chicken fixens, or corn-bread and common doins?" by the latter expressive and elegant soubriquet being signified bacon. Breakfast being over, my foot was once more in the stirrup. The old man accompanied me to the gateway, and shaking my hand in a boisterous agony of good-nature, pressed me to visit him again when he was not drunk. I had proceeded but a few steps on my way when I heard his voice calling after me, and turned my head: "Stran-ger! I say, stran-ger! what do you reckon of sending this young Jack Stewart to Congress?" "Oh, he'll answer." "Well, and that's what I'm a going to vote; and there's a heap o' people always thinks like old Jim does; and that's what made 'em get me groggy last night." I could not but commiserate this old man as I pursued my journey, reflecting on what had passed. He was evidently no common toper; for some of his remarks evinced a keenness of observation, and a depth and shrewdness of thought, which even the withering blight of drunkenness had not completely deadened; and which, with other habits and other circumstances, might have placed him far above the beck and nod of every demagogue. Decatur, Ill.
- 31. XXIX "Ay, but to die, and go we know not where!" Measure for Measure. "Plains immense, interminable meads, And vast savannas, where the wand'ring eye, Unfix'd, is in a verdant ocean lost." Thomson. "Ye shall have miracles; ay, sound ones too, Seen, heard, attested, everything but true." Moore. "Call in the barber! If the tale be long, He'll cut it short, I trust." Middleton. There are few sentiments of that great man Benjamin Franklin for which he is more to be revered than for those respecting the burial-place of the departed.197 The grave-yard is, and should ever be deemed, a holy spot; consecrated, not by the cold formalities of unmeaning ceremony, but by the solemn sacredness of the heart. Who that has committed to earth's cold bosom the relics of one dearer, perchance, than existence, can ever after pass the burial-ground with a careless heart. There is nothing which more painfully jars upon my own feelings—if I may except that wanton desecration of God's sanctuary in some sections of our land [74] for a public commitia—than to see the grave-yard slighted and abused. It is like wounding the memory of a buried friend. And yet it is an assertion which cannot be refuted, that, notwithstanding the reverence which, as a people, we have failed not to manifest for the memory of our dead, the same
- 32. delicate regard and obsequy is not with us observed in the sacred rites as among the inhabitants of the Eastern hemisphere. If, indeed, we may be permitted to gather up an opinion from circumstances of daily notoriety, it would seem that the plat of ground appropriated as a cemetery in many of the villages of our land was devoted to this most holy of purposes solely because useless for every other; as if, after seizing upon every spot for the benefit of the living, this last poor remnant was reluctantly yielded as a resting-place for the departed. And thus has it happened that most of the burial-grounds of our land have either been located in a region so lone and solitary, "You scarce would start to meet a spirit there," or they have been thrust out into the very midst of business, strife, and contention; amid the glare of sunshine, noise, and dust; "the gaudy, babbling, and remorseless day," with hardly a wall of stones to protect them from the inroads of unruly brutes or brutish men. It is as if the rites of sepulture were refused, and the poor boon of a resting-place in the bosom of our common mother denied to her offspring; as if, in our avarice of soul, we grudged even the last narrow house destined for all; and [75] fain would resume the last, the only gift our departed ones may retain. Who would not dread "to die" and have his lifeless clay deposited thus! Who would not, ere the last fleeting particle of existence had "ebbed to its finish," and the feeble breathing had forsaken its tenement for ever, pour forth the anguish of his spirit in the melancholy prayer, "When breath and sense have left this clay, In yon damp vault, oh lay me not! But kindly bear my bones away To some lone, green, and sunny spot." Reverence for the departed is ever a beautiful feature of humanity, and has struck us with admiration for nations of our race who could boast but few redeeming traits beside. It is, moreover, a circumstance not a little remarkable in the history of funeral obsequy, that veneration for the departed has prevailed in a ratio almost inverse to the degree of civilization. Without attempting to account for this circumstance, or to instance the multitude of examples which recur to every mind in its illustration, I would
- 33. only refer to that deep religion of the soul which Nature has implanted in the heart of her simple child of the Western forests, teaching him to preserve and to honour the bones of his fathers! And those mysterious mausoleums of a former race! do they convey no meaning as they rise in lonely grandeur from our beautiful prairies, and look down upon the noble streams which for ages have dashed their dark floods along their base! [76] But a few years have passed away since this empire valley of the West was first pressed by the footstep of civilized man; and, if we except those aged sepulchres of the past, the cities of the dead hardly yet range side by side with the cities of the living. But this cannot always be; even in this distant, beautiful land, death must come; and here it doubtless has come, as many an anguished bosom can witness. Is it not, then, meet, while the busy tide of worldly enterprise is rolling heavily forth over this fair land, and the costly structures of art and opulence are rising on every side, as by the enchantment of Arabian fiction—is it not meet that, amid the pauses of excitement, a solitary thought would linger around that spot, which must surely, reader, become the last resting-place of us all! I have often, in my wanderings through this pleasant land, experienced a thrill of delight which I can hardly describe, to behold, on entering a little Western hamlet, a neat white paling rising up beneath the groves in some green, sequestered spot, whose object none could mistake. Upon some of these, simple as they were, seemed to have been bestowed more than ordinary care; for they betrayed an elaborateness of workmanship and a delicacy of design sought for in vain among the ruder habitations of the living. This is, surely, as it should be; and I pity the man whose feelings cannot appreciate such a touching, beautiful expression of the heart. I have alluded to Franklin, and how pleasant it is to detect the kindly, household emotions of our nature throbbing beneath the [77] starred, dignified breast of philosophy and science. Franklin, the statesman, the sage; he who turned the red lightnings from their wild pathway through the skies, and rocked the iron cradle of the mightiest democracy on the globe! we gaze upon him with awe and astonishment; involuntarily we yield the lofty motto presented by the illustrious Frenchman,198 "Eripuit fulmen cœlo, mox sceptra tyrannis." But when we behold that towering intellect descending from its throne, and intermingling its emotions even with those of the lowliest mind, admiration and reverence are lost in love. The preceding remarks, which have lengthened out themselves far beyond my design, were suggested by the loveliness of the site of the
- 34. graveyard of the little village of Decatur. I was struck with its beauty on entering the place. It was near sunset; in the distance slept the quiet hamlet; upon my right, beneath the grove, peeped out the white paling through the glossy foliage; and as the broad, deep shadows of summer evening streamed lengthening through the trees wide over the landscape, that little spot seemed to my mind the sweetest one in the scene. And should not the burial-ground be ever thus! for who shall tell the emotions which may swell the bosom of many a dying emigrant who here shall find his long, last rest? In that chill hour, how will the thought of home, kindred, friendships, childhood-scenes, come rushing over the memory! and to lay his bones in the [78] quiet graveyard of his own native village, perchance may draw forth many a sorrowing sigh. But this now may never be; yet it will be consoling to the pilgrim-heart to realize that, though the resurrection morn shall find his relics far from the graves of his fathers, he shall yet sleep the long slumber, and at last come forth with those who were kind and near to him in a stranger-land; who laid away his cold clay in no "Potter's Field," but gathered it to their own household sepulchre. The human mind, whatever its philosophy, can never utterly divest itself of the idea that the spirit retains a consciousness of the lifeless body, sympathizing with its honour or neglect, and affected by all that variety of circumstance which may attend its existence: and who shall say how far this belief—superstition though it be—may smooth or trouble the dying pillow! How soothing, too, the reflection to the sorrow of distant friends, that their departed one peacefully and decently was gathered to his rest; that his dust is sleeping quietly in some sweet, lonely spot beneath the dark groves of the far-land; that his turf is often dewed by the teardrop of sympathy, and around his lowly headstone waves the wild-grass ever green and free! The son, the brother, the loved wanderer from his father's home, "Is in his grave! After life's fitful fever, he sleeps well." The route leading to Decatur from the west lies chiefly through a broad branch of the "Grand Prairie," an immense plain, sweeping diagonally, with [79] little interruption, through the whole State of Illinois, from the Mississippi to the Wabash. For the first time, in any considerable number, I here met with those singular granite masses, termed familiarly by the settlers "lost rocks"; in geology, boulders. They are usually of a mammillated, globular figure, the surface perfectly smooth, sometimes six
- 35. hundred tons in weight, and always lying completely isolated, frequently some hundred miles from a quarry. They rest upon the surface or are slightly imbedded in the soil; and, so far as my own observation extends, are of distinct granitic formation, of various density and composition. Several specimens I obtained are as heavy as metal, and doubtless contain iron. Many of them, however, like those round masses dug from the ancient works in Ohio, are pyritous in character. There is a mystery about these "lost rocks" not easily solved, for no granite quarry has ever yet been discovered in Illinois. Their appearance, in the midst of a vast prairie, is dreary and lonely enough. The site of the town of Decatur is somewhat depressed, and in the heart of a grove of noble oaks.199 Long before the traveller reaches it, the whole village is placed before his eye from the rounded summit of the hill, over which winds the road. The neighbouring region is well settled; the prairie high and rolling, and timber abundant. It is not a large place, however; and perhaps there are few circumstances which will render it otherwise for some years. It contains, nevertheless, a few handsome buildings; several trading establishments; a good tavern; is said to be healthy; and, upon the whole, is a far [80] prettier, neater little village than many others of loftier pretensions through which I have passed in Illinois. The village will be intersected by two of the principal railroads of the state, now projected, which circumstance cannot fail to place it in the first rank as an inland trading town. My visit at Decatur was a short one; and, after tea, just as the moon was beginning to silver the tops of the eastern oaks, I left the village and rode leisurely through the forest, in order to enter upon the prairie at dawn the following day. A short distance from Decatur I again forded the Sangamon; the same insignificant stream as ever; and, by dint of scrambling, succeeded in attaining the lofty summit of its opposite bank, from which the surrounding scenery of rolling forest-tops was magnificent and sublime. From this elevation the pathway plunged into a thick grove, dark as Erebus, save where lighted up by a few pale moonbeams struggling through a break in the tree-tops, or the deep-red gleamings of the evening sky streaming at intervals along the undergrowth. The hour was a calm and impressive one: its very loneliness made it sweeter; and that beautiful hymn of the Tyrolean peasantry at sunset, as versified by Mrs. Hemans, was forcibly recalled by the scene:
- 36. "Come to the sunset tree! The day is past and gone; The woodman's axe lies free, And the reaper's work is done. Sweet is the hour of rest! Pleasant the wood's low sigh, And the gleaming of the west, And the turf whereon we lie." [81] After a ride of a few miles my path suddenly emerged from the forest upon the edge of a boundless prairie, from whose dark- rolling herbage, here and there along the distant swells, was thrown back the glorious moonlight, as if from the restless, heaving bosom of the deep. An extensive prairie, beneath a full burst of summer moonlight, is, indeed, a magnificent spectacle. One can hardly persuade himself that he is not upon the ocean-shore. And now a wild, fresh breeze, which all the day had been out playing among the perfumed flowers and riding the green-crested waves, came rolling in from the prairie, producing an undulation of its surface and a murmuring in the heavy forest-boughs perfect in the illusion. All along the low, distant horizon hung a thin mist of silvery gauze, which, as it rose and fell upon the dark herbage, gave an idea of mysterious boundlessness to the scene. Here and there stood out a lonely, weather-beaten tree upon the plain, its trunk shrouded in obscurity, but its leafy top sighing in the night-breeze, and gleaming like a beacon-light in the beams of the cloudless moon. There was a dash of fascinating romance about the scene, which held me involuntarily upon the spot until reminded by the chill dews of night that I had, as yet, no shelter. On casting around my eye, I perceived a low log cabin, half buried in vegetation, standing alone in the skirt of the wood. Although a miserable tenement, necessity compelled me to accept its hospitality, and I entered. It consisted of a single apartment, in which two beds, two stools, a cross-legged deal table, [82] and a rough clothes-press, were the only household furniture. A few indispensable iron utensils sat near the fire; the water-pail and
- 37. gourd stood upon the shelf, and a half-consumed flitch of bacon hung suspended in the chimney; but the superlatives of andirons, shovel and tongs, etc., etc., were all unknown in this primitive abode. A pair of "lost rocks"—lost, indeed—supplied the first, and the gnarled branch of an oak was substituted for the latter. The huge old chimney and fireplace were, as usual, fashioned of sticks and bedaubed with clay; yet everything looked neat, yea, comfortable, in very despite of poverty itself. A young female with her child, an infant boy, in her arms, was superintending the preparation of the evening meal. Her language and demeanour were superior to the miserable circumstances by which she was surrounded; and though she moved about her narrow demesne with a quiet, satisfied air, I was not long in learning that affection alone had transplanted this exotic of the prairie from a more congenial soil. What woman does not love to tell over those passages of her history in which the heart has ruled lord of the ascendant? and how very different in this respect is our sex from hers! Man, proud man, "the creature of interest and ambition," often blushes to be reminded that he has a heart, while woman's cheek mantles with the very intensity of its pulsation! The husband in a few minutes came in from attending to my horse; the rough table was spread; a humble fare was produced; all were seated; and then, beneath that miserable roof, [83] around that meager board, before a morsel of the food, poor as it was, passed the lip of an individual, the iron hand of toil was reverently raised, and a grateful heart called down a blessing from the Mightiest! Ah! thought I, as I beheld the peaceful, satisfied air of that poor man, as he partook of his humble evening meal with gratefulness, little does the son of luxury know the calm contentment which fills his breast! And the great God, as he looks down upon his children and reads their hearts, does he not listen to many a warmer, purer thank-offering from beneath the lowly roof- tree of the wilderness, than from all the palaces of opulence and pride? So it has ever been—so it has ever been—and so can it never cease to be while the heart of man remains attempered as it is.
- 38. The humble repast was soon over; and, without difficulty, I entered into conversation with the father of the family. He informed me that he had been but a few years a resident of Illinois; that he had been unfortunate; and that, recently, his circumstances had become more than usually circumscribed, from his endeavours to save from speculators a pre-emption right of the small farm he was cultivating. This farm was his all; and, in his solicitude to retain its possession, he had disposed of every article of the household which would in any way produce money, even of a part of his own and his wife's wardrobe. I found him a man of considerable intelligence, and he imparted to me some facts respecting that singular sect styling themselves Mormonites of which I was previously hardly aware. Immense [84] crowds of these people had passed his door on the great road from Terre Haute, all with families and household effects stowed away in little one-horse wagons of peculiar construction, and on their journey to Mount Zion, the New Jerusalem, situated near Independence, Jackson county, Missouri! Their observance of the Sabbath was almost pharisaically severe, never permitting themselves to travel upon that day; the men devoting it to hunting, and the females to washing clothes, and other operations of the camp! It was their custom, likewise, to hold a preachment in every village or settlement, whether men would hear or forbear: the latter must have been the case with something of a majority, I think, since no one with whom I have ever met could, for the life of him, give a subsequent expose of Mormonism, "though often requested." "I never heard or could engage A person yet by prayers, or bribes, or tears, To name, define by speech, or write on page, The doctrines meant precisely by that word, Which surely is exceedingly absurd."
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