,
Friendship's ingenuous interchange of mind,
Affection's open-hearted sympathies?
But feel myself an isolated being,
A very wilderness of widowed thought!"

All this is only sad stern truth; nothing morbid here: let any poor
stammerer testify to my faithfulness. Amongst others afflicted like
myself was Charles Kingsley, whom I knew well at a time when I had
overcome my calamity; whereas he carried his to the grave with him;
though he had frequent gleams of a forced and courageous eloquence,
preaching energetically in a somewhat artificial voice,--in private he
stammered much, as once I used to do, no doubt to his mortification,
though humbly acquiescing in God's will.

* * * * *

Chess is a chief intellectual resource to the stammerer; for therein he
can conquer in argument without the toil of speech, and prove himself
practically more eloquent than the men full of talk whom he so much
envies. Accordingly, in days gone by (for of late years I have given it
up, as too toilsome a recreation) I played often at that royal game. In
these times it is no game at all,--but a wearisome if seductive
science; just as cricket is an artillery combat now, and football a most
perilous conflict, and boating breaks the athlete's heart, and billiards
can only be played by a bar-spot professional, and tranquil whist itself
has developed into a semi-fraudulent system of open rules and secret
signs; even so the honest common-sense old game of chess has come to be
so encumbered with published openings and gambits and other parasitic
growths upon the wholesome house-plant, that I for one have renounced
it, as a pursuit for which life is too short and serious (give me a
farce or a story instead), and one moreover in which any fool well up to
crammed book games may crow over the wisest of men in an easy, because
stereotyped, checkmate. However, in this connection, I recollect a small
experience which proves that positive ignorance of famous openings may
sometimes be an advantage; just as the skilled fencer will be baffled by
a brave boor rushing in against rules, and by close encounter
unconventionally pinning him straight off. When a youth, just before
matriculation, I was a guest at Culham of the good rector there, a
chess-player to his own thinking indomitable, for none of the neighbours
could checkmate him: so he thought to make quick work of a silent but
thoughtful boy-stammerer,--by temp