He is preeminently a writer of romance. He was always powerfully influenced
by such romantic materials as may be found in the world of witchcraft and
the supernatural, or such as are suggested by dim foreshadowings of evil
and by the many mysteries for which human philosophy does not account. For
this reason, his works are removed from the commonplace and enveloped in an
imaginative atmosphere. He subjects his use of these romantic
materials--the unusual, the improbable, and the supernatural--to only one
touchstone. He is willing to avail himself of these, so long as he does
not, in his own phrase, "swerve aside from the truth of the human heart."
His stories are frequently symbolic. He selects some object, token, or
utterance, in harmony with his purpose, and uses it as a symbol to
prefigure some moral action or result. The symbol may be an embroidered
mantle, indicative of pride; a butterfly, typical of emergence from a dead
chrysalis to a state of ideal beauty; or the words of a curse, which
prophesy a ghastly death. His choice of scene, plot, and character is in
harmony with the moral purpose indicated by the symbol. Sometimes this
purpose is dimly veiled in allegory, but even when his stories are sermons
in allegory, like _The Snow Image_, he so invests them with poetic fancy or
spiritual beauty as to make them works of art.
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