'A great wilderness
A great wilderness of unfinished fabrics
Life everywhere is full of beginnings never carried on to completion . There is . . .
not a soul wreck on the streets,
not a prisoner serving out a sentence behind prison bars,
not a debased, fallen one anywhere —
in whose soul there were not once visions of beauty, high hopes, holy thoughts and purposes, and high resolves — an ideal of something lovely and noble.
But, alas! the visions, the hopes, the purposes, the resolves, never grew into more than beginnings . God's angels bend down and see . . .
a great wilderness of unfinished fabrics ,
bright possibilities unfulfilled,
noble might-have-beens abandoned, ghastly ruins now,
and memorials only of failure.