IN TESLA’S LABORATORY.

Here in the dark what ghostly figures press !—

No phantom of the Past, or grim or sad ;

No wailing spirit of woe ; no spector, clad

In white and wandering cloud, whose dumb distress

Is that its crime it never may confess ;

No shape from the strewn sea ; nor they that add

The link of Life and Death — the tearless mad,

That live nor die in dreary nothingness :

But blessed spirits waiting to be born —

Thoughts, to unlock the fettering chains of things ;

The Better Time ; the Universal Good.

Their smile is like the joyous break of morn ;

How fair, how near, how wistfully they brood !

Listen ! that murmur is of angels’ wings.

Robert Underwood Johnson.

This poem appeared in Century Magazine, April 1895, Vol. 49, page 933.

 R. James McCabe