What if criticism is a science as well as an art? Not a pure or exact science, of course, but these phrases belong to a nineteenth-century cosmology which is no longer with us.

Read Blake or go to hell, that's my message to the modern world.

The tremendous efficiency and economy of the book has once again demonstrated itself. It's the world's most patient medium.

The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.

The human landscape of the New World shows a conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it.

The metaphor of the king as the shepherd of his people goes back to ancient Egypt. Perhaps the use of this particular convention is due to the fact that, being stupid, affectionate, gregarious, and easily stampeded, the societies formed by sheep are most like human ones.

It seems to me that Canadian sensibility has been profoundly disturbed, not so much by our famous problem of identity, important as that is, as by a series of paradoxes in what confronts that identity. It is less perplexed by the question "Who am I?" than by some such riddle as "Where is here?