This achievement was curtailed by his early death.  It was a great loss to his friends, but perhaps not so much to literature.  I think that he had given his measure fully in the few books he had the time to write.  Let me not be misunderstood:  the loss was great, but it was the loss of the delight his art could give, not the loss of any further possible revelation.  As to himself, who can say how much he gained or lost by quitting so early this world of the living, which he knew how to set before us in the terms of his own artistic vision?  Perhaps he did not lose a great deal.  The recognition he was accorded was rather languid and given him grudgingly.  The worthiest welcome he secured for his tales in this country was from Mr. W. Henley in the New Review and later, towards the end of his life, from the late Mr. William Blackwood in his magazine.  For the rest I must say that during his sojourn in England he had the misfortune to be, as the French say, mal entoure.  He was beset by people who understood not the quality of his genius and were antagonistic to the deeper fineness of his nature.  Some of them have died since, but dead or alive they are not worth speaking about now.  I don’t think he had any illusions about them himself:  yet there was a strain of good-nature and perhaps of weakness in his character which prevented him from shaking himself free from their worthless and patronising attentions, which in those days caused me much secret irritation whenever I stayed with him in either of his English homes.  My wife and I like best to remember him riding to meet us at the gate of the Park at Brede.  Born master of his sincere impressions, he was also a born horseman.  He never appeared so happy or so much to advantage as on the back of a horse.  He had formed the project of teaching my eldest boy to ride, and meantime, when the child was about two years old, presented him with his first dog.

I saw Stephen Crane a few days after his arrival in London.  I saw him for the last time on his last day in England.  It was in Dover, in a big hotel, in a bedroom with a large window looking on to the sea.  He had been very ill and Mrs. Crane was taking him to some place in Germany, but one glance at that wasted face was enough to tell me that it was the most forlorn of all hopes.  The last words he breathed out to me were:  “I am tired.  Give my love to your wife and child.”  When I stopped at the door for another look I saw that he had turned his head on the pillow and was staring wistfully out of the window at the sails of a cutter yacht that glided slowly across the frame, like a dim shadow against the grey sky.

Those who have read his little tale, “Horses,” and the story, “The Open Boat,” in the volume of that name, know with what fine understanding he loved horses and the sea.  And his passage on this earth was like that of a horseman riding swiftly in the dawn of a day fated to be short and without sunshine.