It rains.

This verb is insisted on as the strongest proof of intransitive action; with what propriety, we will now inquire.  It will serve as a clear elucidation of the whole theory of intransitive verbs.

What does the expression signify?  It simply declares the fact, that water is shed down from the clouds.  But is there no object after rains?  There is none expressed.  Is there nothing rained? no effect produced?  If not, there can be no water fallen, and our cisterns would be as empty, our streams as low, and fields as parched, after a rain as before it!  But who that has common sense, and has never been blinded by the false rules of grammar, does not know that when it rains, it never fails to rain rain, water, or rain-water, unless you have one of the paddy’s dry rains?  When it hails, it hails hail, hail-stones, or frozen rain.  When it snows, it snows snow, sometimes two feet of it, sometimes less.  I should think teachers in our northern countries would find it exceeding difficult to convince their readers that snow is an intransitive verb—­that it snows nothing.  And yet so it is; people will remain wedded to their old systems, and refuse to open their eyes and behold the evidences every where around them.  Teachers themselves, the guides of the young—­and I blush to say it, for I was long among the number—­have, with their scholars, labored all the morning, breaking roads, shovelling snow, and clearing paths, to get to the school-house, and then set down and taught them that to snow is an intransitive verb.  What nonsense; nay, worse, what falsehoods have been instilled into the youthful mind in the name of grammar!  Can we be surprised that people have not understood grammar? that it is a dry, cold, and lifeless business?

I once lectured in Poughkeepsie, N. Y. In a conversation with Miss B., a distinguished scholar, who had taught a popular female school for twenty years; was remarking upon the subject of intransitive verbs, and the apparent inconsistency of the new system, that all verbs must have an object after them, expressed or understood; she said, “there was the verb rain, (it happened to be a rainy day,) the whole action is confined to the agent; it does not pass on to another object; it is purely intransitive.”  Her aged mother, who had never looked into a grammar book, heard the conversation, and very bluntly remarked, “Why, you fool you, I want to know if you have studied grammar these thirty years, and taught it more than twenty, and have never larned that when it rains it always rains rain?  If it didn’t, do you s’pose you’d need an umbrella to go out now into the storm?  I should think you’d know better.  I always told you these plaguy grammars were good for nothing, I didn’t b’lieve.”  “Amen,” said I, to the good sense of the old lady, “you are right, and have reason to