Strindberg suggests the soul's corruption and the soul's ineffable sweetness with the same impassioned power of creation. In _Swanwhite_, the charming fairy play in which the influence of Maeterlinck is discernible, the budding love between a fairy-like princess and a chivalrous prince is described with a delicacy which brings the reader into a land of romance and roses, of stainless purity and spring-like innocence. In _Advent_ we are brought into the house of wickedness, of cruel, designing, ancient wickedness. The old judge and his wife are steeped in every variety of human treachery and vileness. They die, and we follow them into the darkness of hell, where the seven deadly sins have grouped themselves around the throne of the monarch. Through the pain of being made to see themselves as they really are, they cry out for light. In both pieces the "supernatural" plays the most important part; the wicked stepmother in _Swanwhite_ exhales a breath of evil before which the rose fades, and the dove falls dead; the ill-treated children in _Advent_ are comforted by a mysterious playmate, clad in white, who brings light into the dark cellar in which they have been imprisoned. The story in _The Crown Bride_ of a peasant girl, who kills her child, is told with an exalted simplicity, and given a setting of the old fairy-faith of Dalecarlia which peoples the rivers with nature-spirits and the forests with _trolls_. Here, as in the other fairy plays, things are endowed with souls, and the fierce hatred between the two old peasant families is reflected by every object that surrounds them. Unknown forces are all the time engaged in a mystic underplay which is the real action of the piece.