Thoreau checks out Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, volumes 1 and 2 by William Godwin from Harvard College Library (Companion to Thoreau’s Correspondence, 287). While he reads over the next few days, he copies extracts from volume 2 (as well as volumes 3 and 4, which he didn’t take out of the library) into a notebook.
Thoreau is absent from a meeting of the Institute of 1770 in which Institute member Charles Theodore Russell lectures on “Poetry.” He is selected to debate and lecture at the next meeting (The Transcendentalists and Minerva, 1:82).
