There is the silence that comes between husband and wife. There is the silence of those who have failed; And the vast silence that covers Broken nations and vanquished leaders. There is the silence of Lincoln, Thinking of the poverty of his youth. And the silence of Napoleon After Waterloo. And the silence of Jeanne d’Arc Saying amid the flames, “Blesséd Jesus”— Revealing in two words all sorrow, all hope. And there is the silence of age, Too full of wisdom for the tongue to utter it In words intelligible to those who have not lived The great range of life. And there is the silence of the dead. If we who are in life cannot speak Of profound experiences, Why do you marvel that the dead Do not tell you of death? Their silence shall be interpreted As we approach them. _Stephen Crane_ Stephen Crane, whose literary career was one of the most meteoric in American letters, was born at Newark, New Jersey, November 1, 1871. After taking a partial course at Lafayette College, he entered journalism at sixteen and, until the time of his death, was a reporter and writer of newspaper sketches. When he died, at the age of thirty, he had ten printed volumes standing to his credit, two more announced for publication, and two others which were appearing serially. Crane’s most famous novel, _The Red Badge of Courage_ (1895), was written when he was twenty-two years old. What is even more astonishing is the fact that this detailed description of blood and battlefields was written by a civilian far from the scene of conflict. This novel (Crane’s second) was an instantaneous and international success. _The Atlantic Monthly_ pronounced it “great enough to set a new fashion in literature”; H. G. Wells, speaking of its influence in England, said Crane was “the first expression of the opening mind or a new period ... a record of an intensity beyond all precedent.” Crane’s other books, although less powerful than _The Red Badge of Courage_, are scarcely less vivid. _The Open Boat_ (1898) and _The Monster_ (1899) are full of an intuitive wisdom and a sensitivity that caused Wells to exclaim “The man who can call these ‘brilliant fragments’ would reproach Rodin for not ‘completing’ his fragments.” At various periods in Crane’s brief career, he experimented in verse, seeking to find new effects in unrhymed lines, a new acuteness of vision. The results were embodied in two volumes of unusual poetry, _The Black Riders_ (1895) and _War Is Kind_ (1899), lines that strangely anticipated the Imagists and the epigrammatic free verse that followed fifteen years later.