"Expect no more or word or sign from me. Free, upright, and sane is thine own free will, and it would be wrong not to act according to its pleasure; wherefore thee over thyself I crown and mitre."[44:5] But moral self-reliance is not the last word. As Beatrice, the image of tenderness and holiness, comes to Dante in the earthly paradise, and leads him from the summit of purgatory into the heaven of heavens, and even to the eternal light; so there is added to the mere human, intellectual, and moral resources of the soul, the sustaining power of the divine grace, the illuminating power of divine truth, and the transforming power of divine love. Through the aid of this higher wisdom, the journey of life becomes the way to God. Thus the allegorical truth of the "Divina Commedia" is not merely an analysis of the moral nature of man, but the revelation of a universal spiritual order, manifesting itself in the moral evolution of the individual, and above all in his ultimate community with the eternal goodness. "Thou shouldst not, if I deem aright, wonder more at thy ascent, than at a stream if from a high mountain it descends to the base. A marvel it would be in thee, if, deprived of hindrance, thou hadst sat below, even as quiet by living fire in earth would be."[45:6] Such, in brief, is Dante's world-view, so suggestive of the freer idealistic conceptions of later thought as to justify a recent characterization of him as one who, "accepting without a shadow of a doubt or hesitation all the constitutive ideas of mediæval thought and life, grasped them so firmly and gave them such luminous expression that the spirit in them broke away from the form."[46:7] But it must be added, as in the case of Wordsworth, that Dante is a philosopher-poet not because St. Thomas Aquinas appears and speaks with authority in the Thirteenth Canto of the "Paradiso," nor even because a philosophical doctrine can be consistently formulated from his writings, but because his consciousness of life is informed with a sense of its universal bearings. There is a famous passage in the Twenty-second Canto of the "Paradiso," in which Dante describes himself as looking down upon the earth from the starry heaven. "'Thou art so near the ultimate salvation,' began Beatrice, 'that thou oughtest to have thine eyes clear and sharp. And therefore ere thou further enterest it, look back downward, and see how great a world I have already set beneath thy feet, in order that thy heart, so far as it is able, may present itself joyous to the triumphant crowd which comes glad through this round ether.' With my sight I returned through each and all the seven spheres, and saw this globe such that I smiled at its mean semblance; and that counsel I approve as the best which holds it of least account; and he who thinks of other things maybe called truly worthy."