to snow_ is an
_in_transitive 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 be thankful that you have never been
initiated into the intricate windings, nor been perplexed with the false
and contradictory rules, which have blasted many bright geniuses in
their earliest attempts to gain a true knowledge of the sublime
principles of language, on which depends so much of the happiness of
human life." The good matron's remark was a poser to the daughter, but
it served as a means of her entire deliverance from the thraldom of
neuter verbs, and the adoption of the new principles of the exposition
of language.

The anecdote shows us how the unsophisticated mind will observe facts,
and employ words as correctly, if not more so, than those schooled in
the high pretensions of science, falsely taught. Who does not know from
the commonest experience, that the direct object of _raining_ must
follow as the necessary sequence? that it can never fail? And yet our
philologists tell us that such is not always the case; and that the
exception is to be marked on the singular ground, whether the word is
written out or omitted! What a narrow view of the sublime laws of
motion! What a limited knowled