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Test Prep CLEP Composition and Literature Exam Questions
CLEP Composition and Literature: American Literature, English Literature, Humanities (Page 7 )

Updated On: 21-Feb-2026
Page 7 of 44
PDF with 213 Questions

Nature, the gentlest mother, Impatient of no child,
The feeblest or the waywardest, – Her admonition mild

In forest and the hill By traveller is heard,
Restraining rampant squirrel Or too impetuous bird.

How fair her conversation, A summer afternoon, –
Her household, her assembly;
And when the sun goes down

Her voice among the aisles Incites the timid prayer
Of the minutest cricket, The most unworthy flower.

When all the children sleep She turns as long away
As will suffice to light her lamps; Then, bending from the sky,

With infinite affection And infiniter care,
Her golden finger on her lip, Wills silence everywhere.

“Her golden finger on her lip” (line 24) is an example of

  1. rhyme
  2. ellipsis
  3. alliteration
  4. personification
  5. metonymy

Answer(s): D

Explanation:

Personification is when a natural phenomenon is expressed in human terms. In this case the sun setting over the horizon is represented as Mother Nature’s “golden finger on her lip.”



I am a rather elderly man. The nature of my avocations for the last thirty years has brought me into more than ordinary contact with what would seem an interesting and somewhat singular set of men of whom as yet nothing that I know of has ever been written: – mean the law copyists or scriveners.

The sentence above was written by

  1. Herman Melville
  2. Margaret Fuller
  3. Rebecca Harding Davis
  4. Walt Whitman
  5. George Washington Harris

Answer(s): A

Explanation:

These are the opening words of Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” (1853). The story is written in the first person and the opening sentence mentions the protagonist’s profession – a scrivener (a public copyist or writer).



Which author’s polemical anti-slavery novel was first published as episodes in the weekly The National Era?

  1. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
  2. Harriet Beecher Stowe
  3. Booker T. Washington
  4. Charlotte Perkins Gilman
  5. W.B. DuBois

Answer(s): B

Explanation:

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was first published in 40 weekly installments in the Washington anti-slavery weekly The National Era.



All of the following are known primarily as poets active during the American Romantic period EXCEPT

  1. Lowell
  2. Longfellow
  3. Emerson
  4. Whitman
  5. Dickinson

Answer(s): C

Explanation:

Although Emerson wrote during the Romantic period, he – along with Thoreau and Holmes – was known primarily as an essayist, not a poet.



Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchers of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?

The passage above is from the work of

  1. Ralph Waldo Emerson
  2. Mark Twain
  3. Edith Wharton
  4. Louisa May Alcott
  5. Kate Chopin

Answer(s): A

Explanation:

The passage is from the opening paragraph of Emerson’s Nature (1836). Nature explains the main principle of Transcendentalism, the concept of a “mystical unity of nature.” Emerson urged independent thinking and encouraged readers to learn from life rather than from books alone.






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