At age seven - after spending 12 weeks in a one room schoolhouse with 39 other students of all ages - Tom's overworked short tempered teacher lost his patience with the child's persistent questioning and relatively self centered behavior. ... By age 13, mini-publishing was netting Tom more than ten dollars a day, and he was proudly providing for his own support. ... After his usually tolerant mother complained about the danger of all the "poisons" he was amassing, he transferred some of them to a locked room in the basement. ... One day, during the process of "proving out" every expe...

• Word Count: 3349
• Approx Pages: 13
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

." - Ralph Waldo Emerson A Condensation of Its Context Toward the end of his notebook, "Naturalist," Ralph Waldo Emerson entered sentence (dated 1853) that marks a symbolic vision of nature familiar to his readers and, in more recent years, of concern to his ecologically minded critics: "He is the richest who has most use for nature as raw material of tropes and symbols with which to describe his life." (2) One can see why the tradition of reading Emerson's nature writing and environmental aesthetics in sharp contrast with Henry David Thoreau's--Thoreau viewed as "Emerson's ea...

• Word Count: 9971
• Approx Pages: 40
• Grade Level: Undergraduate