burning thoughts? 
    That I can never with unmingled joy
    Meet a long-loved and long-expected friend
    Because I feel, but cannot vent my feelings,—­
    Because I know I ought, but must not, speak,—­
    Because I mark his quick impatient eye
    Striving in kindness to anticipate
    The word of welcome strangled in its birth? 
    Is it not sorrow, while I truly love
    Sweet social converse, to be forced to shun
    The happy circle, from a nervous sense—­
    An agonising poignant consciousness—­
    That I must stand aloof, nor mingle with
    The wise and good in rational argument,
    The young in brilliant quickness of reply,
    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