The Waste Land has important connections with the Aeneid beyond those of a shared mythic configuration. These connections are primarily literary and we receive them as Gilbert Highet describes the allusions of symbolist poets—in hints, nuances, phrases repeated in a dream. So Eliot evokes the concatenation of events in the first six books of the Aeneid, and like Virgil he reformulates the literary monuments of the past as a comment upon the present age. Episodes in the Aeneid that have become part of the literary tradition, that have been reformulated by Dante, Spenser, and Milton, are echoed in Eliot's poem. Images of The Waste Land—the drowned Phoenician sailor, the lady of situations, the man with three staves, the Wheel, the card that is blank, Mrs. Equitone—have conspicuous analogues in the Aeneid. Significantly, Anchises' great sermon in the sixth book of Virgil's poem is not only a recapitulation of Aeneas' own purgatorial experiences as quester but also suggests the movement of The Waste Land as a series of trials by water, wind, and fire. In sum, The Waste Land assumes the central importance of Virgil; Virgil is for Eliot, as he was for Dante, a guide and an inspiration.

The House of the Seven Gables may owe a considerable debt to Eliza Leslie's “The Daughters of Dr. Byles,” a sketch of the two spinster great-granddaughters of Increase Mather in Graham's Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine (Jan., Feb., 1842). Both Hepzibah Pyncheon and the Misses Mary and Catherine Byles reside in black ancestral homes shaded by giant trees and furnished with portraits, chairs, and tables from another age. Hepzibah, who physically resembles Catherine, lives, like the aged sisters, under the imprint of the past, seldom venturing into the world; she simply awaits the return of her brother, whose miniature she cherishes and whose prison sentence has kept him away for thirty years, as the Misses Byles await the return of their nephew, whose portrait hangs prominently in the parlor and whose self-imposed exile has lasted forty years. Hawthorne closes his romance as Leslie closes her essay, with the exchange of a temporal home for one of eternity.