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.