Dante must now have been engaged in writing the Paradise. Amongst the sufferings and burdens which were fast drawing him to the grave, amongst the agonies of indignation, of regret, of hope, of disappointment which still wracked his soul, the deep peace of God had come upon him; beneath a storm of passion at which our hearts quail was a calm of trustful self-surrender which no earthly power could disturb; for the harmonies of Paradise swelled in the poet's heart and sought for utterance in these last years. But though his spirit was thus rapt to Heaven, he never lost his hold upon the earth; never disdained to toil as best he might for the immediate instruction or well-being of his kind. More than once his eloquence and skill enabled him to render signal service to his protectors in conducting delicate negotiations, and at the same time to further that cause of Italian unity which was ever near his heart. Nor did the progress of his great work, the Comedy, withhold him from a varied subsidiary activity as a poet, a moralist, and a student of language and science. One characteristic example of this by-work must suffice. In the last year but one of his life when he must have been meditating the last, perhaps the sublimest, cantos of the Paradise, when he might well have been excused if he had ceased to concern himself with any of the lower grades of truth, he heard a certain question of physics discussed and re-discussed, and never decided because of the specious but sophistical arguments which were allowed to veil it in doubt. The question was whether some portions of the sea are or are not at a higher level than some portions of the land; and Dante, 'nursed from his boyhood in the love of truth,' as he says, 'could not endure to leave the question unresolved, and determined to demonstrate the facts and to refute the arguments alleged against them.'[26] Accordingly he defended his thesis on a Sunday in one of the churches of Verona under the presidency of Can Grande. This essay is a model of close reasoning and sound scientific method, and the average nineteenth century reader, with the average contempt for fourteenth century science, would find much to reflect upon should he read and understand it. The vague and inconclusive style of reasoning against which Dante contends is still rampant everywhere, though its forms have changed; while the firm grasp of scientific method and the incisive reasoning of Dante himself are still the exception in spite of all our modern training in research. Thus Dante was engaged to the last upon the whole field of human thought. Such was the scope and power of his mind that he could embrace at the same moment the very opposite poles of speculation; and such was his passion for truth that, when gazing upon the very presence of God, he could not bear to leave men in error when he could set them right, though it were but as to the level of the land and sea. * * * * *