Toiling Upward in the Night

May 8, 2026
— Toiling Upward in the Night —
The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, but they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night.
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) was the most widely read American poet of the nineteenth century. Born in Portland, Maine, he attended Bowdoin College alongside his lifelong friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, traveled extensively in Europe to prepare himself for a career in modern languages, and eventually became a professor at Harvard. He resigned the chair in 1854 to write full time. By the end of his life he was so beloved that Queen Victoria received him at Windsor and reported afterward that her servants had crowded behind doors and curtains for a glimpse of him — a reception, she wryly observed, that no English duke would have commanded.
The public Longfellow was a poet of exceptional discipline. He produced “Paul Revere’s Ride,” “The Song of Hiawatha,” “Evangeline,” “The Courtship of Miles Standish,” “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” and the first complete American translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy — a project he undertook as a way of climbing back out of grief.
The private Longfellow was a man whose life was carved by losses that would have stopped most men cold. His first wife, Mary, miscarried during a European trip and died not long after. He remarried Frances Appleton in 1843 and found, in her, a happiness that lasted eighteen years. In July 1861, while Frances was sealing locks of their children’s hair into wax envelopes, her dress caught fire. Longfellow tried to smother the flames with his own body. She died the next morning. He was so badly burned that he could not attend her funeral. The white beard for which he later became famous covered scars he carried for the rest of his life.
He kept writing. The Dante translation became, in part, the labor by which he survived. Years later, during the Civil War, when his son Charles was severely wounded in battle, he wrote the Christmas poem that became the carol I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day. The toiling upward in the night, for Longfellow, was not metaphor.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
The lines above come from a poem called The Ladder of St. Augustine, published in 1850. The poem opens by quoting Augustine — whose voice you have already met in this book on April 11 — and his striking image: that of our vices, our defeats, our sorrows, we may build a ladder by which we climb above them, treading each one underfoot as we ascend. Longfellow’s poem develops the metaphor for an entire life. The heights are not given. They are climbed. The climbing happens at hours when most of the world is not watching.
The stanza is one of the most quoted in American letters because it names, in twenty-four words, what most achievement actually looks like from the inside. The visible result — the height reached and kept — is the smallest part of the story. The larger part is the unseen hours when nothing visible was happening. Most of what matters is built that way.
SCRIPTURE CROSS-LINKS
D&C 64:33 — “Be not weary in well-doing, for ye are laying the foundation of a great work. And out of small things proceedeth that which is great.” — The doctrine of cumulative effort. Foundations are laid invisibly. The greatness comes later.
Galatians 6:9 — “And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.” — The harvest is in due season — not on demand, not on the timetable of impatience. The condition is simply that we do not faint.
1 Corinthians 15:58 — “Be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.” — The reassurance that the labor itself counts, even when its outcome is hidden.
Mosiah 4:27 — “It is not requisite that a man should run faster than he has strength… that he might win the prize; therefore, all things must be done in order.” — King Benjamin’s gentle correction to those who would burn out in the climb. Steady. Ordered. Sustainable.
Hebrews 12:1 — “Let us run with patience the race that is set before us.” — Patience is the qualifier. A race run without it is not the race we were given.
THEMATIC REFLECTION
There is a kind of work that the world sees, and a kind of work that no one sees. The world sees the surgery. It does not see the years of medical school and residency, the thousands of cases reviewed, the small refinements of technique that came at the cost of long evenings when nothing felt finished. The world sees the marriage that has lasted fifty years. It does not see the ten thousand small choices to forgive, to try again, to be patient one more time. The world sees the child who turned out well. It does not see the parent who got up at three in the morning, year after year, when no one else was awake.
This is what Longfellow’s stanza names. The heights are real. They are reached. They are kept. But they are not attained by sudden flight. Sudden flight is a fantasy of the impatient — a hope that some single moment of inspiration, decision, or breakthrough will deliver what only the long climb actually delivers. Sudden flight does not exist. It never has. What looks from the outside like sudden ascent is almost always the visible portion of a much longer, mostly invisible toil.
The companions in the line are important. Most people sleep. That is not a moral judgment — most people are simply doing what most people do, and there is nothing wrong with rest. But the heights are reached by those who do not require their work to be witnessed in order to do it. They climb at night. They climb when no one is keeping score. They climb because the climb itself is what they have decided to be the kind of person who does.
This is the gift of long faithfulness. Not the gift of celebrity, not the gift of arrival, but the gift of becoming — over years, mostly in the dark — someone who is recognizably yourself, made by your own hands one quiet hour at a time.
PERSONAL REFLECTION
Mom — my mother, your great-grandmother Mary Jane Condie Olsen — used to say, “When a task is once begun, never leave it till it’s done.” She said it so often that her grandchildren still finish the sentence when one of us starts it. Her voice is in this Longfellow stanza, even though she never quoted Longfellow that I can remember. The same truth, expressed two ways.
I have thought about that line a great many times during my career in medicine. There were nights — I do not need to detail them here, but there were many — when I was the one in the hospital while almost everyone else I knew was asleep at home. Patients do not become well during business hours. They get sicker at three in the morning, and recover by inches over weeks no one outside the family ever sees. The nurses who carried the long shifts knew this. The residents and attendings who took the night call knew it. Most of the most important medicine I ever practiced happened at hours that no one ever asked me about afterward.
What I want you to know is that this is not a complaint. It is the deepest privilege of the work. To be the one who is awake when someone needs you to be awake — that is not drudgery. That is sacred. The toiling upward in the night was the climb. The climb was the gift.
I think most worthwhile lives are built that way. Not the visible heights — those are the smallest part — but the long, mostly hidden ascent that the climber alone is fully aware of. You will have your own version of this. Your work will have its own night hours, even if they are not literal. Whatever they are, do not despise them. They are where you become.
— Richard K. Olsen
GRANDFATHER’S COUNSEL
Three things to hold from Longfellow today.
First — do not believe in sudden flight. Whatever you are trying to build — a marriage, a profession, a faith, a character — will not be built that way. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. The real thing is built slowly, in hours that mostly nobody watches, through small decisions that mostly seem to make no difference. Trust the small decisions. They are making the difference.
Second — do your night hours well. Every life has them. The shift no one wants. The long convalescence. The years of caring for a parent or a child or a spouse when the work is invisible and the gratitude scarce. These hours are the real climb. Do not waste them by resenting them. They are how heights are reached.
Third — and this is what I most want you to hear — the climb itself is the gift. Not the height. Not the recognition that may or may not come at the end. The climb. The becoming. The slow and faithful process of turning into the person God always meant you to be. Even if no one ever fully sees it. Even if the only witness is the One who matters most.
When a task is once begun, your great-grandmother said, never leave it till it’s done. Toil upward, Longfellow added, in the night. They were the same teacher, in different centuries, trying to tell you the same true thing.
Climb.
— Richard K. Olsen