Thoreau checks out Euripides’ Alcestis and Ion from Harvard College Library (Companion to Thoreau’s Correspondence, 287).

Thoreau also attends a meeting of the Institute of 1770, in which the topic “Is the immense mass of Literature of the present day beneficial?” is debated and Edward Henry Kettel lectures on the “Character of Washington” (The Transcendentalists and Minerva, 1:82).