Not only are new materials introduced in the later fiction of the uncanny but new types are stressed. In addition to the weird stories told with direct aim and art--ghosts for ghosts' sake--there are tales where the supernatural element is of secondary importance, being used to teach some truth or ridicule some fallacy. The symbolistic, humorous, and satiric methods abound in modern occult fiction and when well done have a double effect, that of primary supernatural impressiveness, and, in addition, of the subtler purposes behind the stories. Moralized legends, spiritual allegories such as Hawthorne wrote with consummate art, have continued to the present and form a contrast to the crude machinery of Gothic horrors. The delicacy of suggestion, the power of hinted ghostliness, though manifest in Shakespeare, are really modern achievements, for no one save him attained to them in earlier art. Mystic poetic fiction, spiritual symbolism appears in much of the modern unearthly writing. In certain cases it is interesting to note the change of old mythological stories into moral allegory. The plays and the stories of Lord Dunsany are peculiarly symbolic and have the force of antique mythology made instant and real. Yet they have a distinctive touch all their own. For instance, the story of the king who goes over the world seeking his lost yesterday, his dear past, who is told by the weird keeper of the bygone years that he cannot have it back, no not one golden second, has a delicate pathos of poetry. When the mournful king has gone back to his palace, a hoar harper comes who plays for him, and lo! to the strings of the harp have clung the golden seconds of his happiest hours, so that he lives them over again while the music lasts. _The Book of the Serpent_ tells symbolic stories that are poems in prose, fantastic fables. The Creator is making experiments with dust-heaps, while the Serpent, the Turtle, and the Grasshopper look on, ask questions, and offer comments. The Serpent trails all through the dust-heap meant as stuff for artists, and the Maker drops a tear in that whereof He means to make mothers. He experiments with monkeys trying to learn how best to make man, and after man is complete, He makes woman. The stories of Oscar Wilde have, some of them, a beauty like that of some antique illuminated missal, with its jeweled words, its mystic figures. Wilde's ornate style, prose that trembles on the verge of poetry, full of passion and color and light, makes one think of his own words in _The Nightingale and the Rose_, where the poet's song was "builded of music by moonlight and stained with his own heart's blood."