The Ready-to-Halts are never ready for any thing else. They can walk as
well as anybody else, if they only would; but they are never quite sure on
which road they would better go. Great Hearts have to go back, and go
back, to look them up. They are found standing still, helpless and
bewildered, on all sorts of absurd side-paths, which lead nowhere; and
they never will confess, either, that they need help. They always think
they are doing what they call "making up their mind." But, whichever way
they make it, they wish they had made it the other; so they unmake it
directly. And by this time the crisis of the first hour which they lost
has become complicated with that of the second hour, for which they are in
no wise ready; and so the hours stumble on, one after another, and the day
is only a tangle of ineffective cross purposes. Hundreds of such days
drift on, with their sad burden of wasted time. Year after year their
lives fail of growth, of delight, of blessing to others. Opportunity's
great golden doors, which never stay long open for any man, have always
just closed when they reach the threshold of a deed; and it is hard, very
hard, to see why it would not have been better for them if they had never
been born.

After all, it is not right to be impatient with them; for, in nine cases
out of ten, they are no more responsible for their mental limp than the
poor Chinese woman is for her feeble feet. From their infancy up to what
in our comic caricature of words we call "maturity," they have been
bandaged. How should their muscles be good for any thing? From the day
when we give, and take, and arrange the baby's playthings for him, hour by
hour, without ever setting before him to choose one of two and give up the
other, to the day when we take it upon ourselves to decide whether he
shall be an engineer or a lawyer, we persist in doing for him the work
which he should do for himself. This is because we love him more than we
love our own lives. Oh! if love could but have its eyes opened and see!