Louisa S. Guggenberger (1845–1895)

THERE are sea and sky about me,

And yet nothing sense can mark;

For a mist fills all the midnight

Adding blindness to its dark.

There is not the faintest echo

From the life of yesterday:

Not the vaguest stir foretelling

Of a morrow on the way.

’Tis negation’s hour of triumph

In the absence of the sun;

’Tis the hour of endings, ended,

Of beginnings, unbegun.

Yet the voice of awful silence

Bids my waiting spirit hark;

There is action in the stillness,

There is progress in the dark.

In the drift of things and forces

Comes the better from the worse,

Swings the whole of Nature upward,

Wakes, and thinks—a universe.

There will be more life to-morrow,

And of life, more life that knows;

Though the sum of force be constant

Yet the Living ever grows.

So we sing of evolution,

And step strongly on our ways;

And we live through nights in patience,

And we learn the worth of days.

In the silence of murk midnight

Is revealed to me this thing:

Nothing hinders, all enables

Nature’s vast awakening.