  The High Altitude Water Cherenkov Gamma-Ray Observatory (HAWC) continuously
detects TeV photons and particles within its large field-of-view, accumulating
every day a deeper exposure of two thirds of the sky. We analyzed 1523~days of
HAWC live data acquired over four and a half years, in a follow-up analysis of
{138} nearby ($z<0.3$) active galactic nuclei from the {\em Fermi} 3FHL catalog
culminating within $40^\circ$ of the zenith at Sierra Negra, the HAWC site.
This search for persistent TeV emission used a maximum-likelihood analysis
assuming intrinsic power-law spectra attenuated by pair production of gamma-ray
photons with the extragalactic background light. HAWC clearly detects
persistent emission from Mkn~421 and Mkn~501, the two brightest blazars in the
TeV sky, at 65$\sigma$ and 17$\sigma$ level, respectively. {Weaker evidence for
long-term emission is found for three other known very-high energy emitters:}
the radiogalaxy M87 and the BL Lac objects VER~J0521+211 and 1ES~1215+303, the
later two at $z\sim 0.1$. We find evidence for collective emission from the set
of 30 previously reported very high-energy sources that excludes Mkn~421 and
Mkn~501 with a random probability $\sim 10^{-5}$. Upper limits are presented
for the sample under the power-law assumption and in the predefined (0.5-2.0),
(2.0-8.0) and (8.0-32.0) TeV energy intervals.
