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 knowledge of things! or else, what a mistake!
"Then the Lord said unto Moses, behold, I will rain bread for you from heaven."
"Then the Lord rained down, upon Sodom and Gomorrah, brimstone and fire, from the Lord out of heaven."—Bible.
The fire burns.
The fire burns the wood, the coal, or the peat. The great fire in New-York burned the buildings which covered fifty-two acres of ground. Mr. Experiment burns coal in preference to wood. His new grate burns it very finely. Red ash coal burns the best; it makes the fewest ashes, and hence is the most convenient. The cook burns too much fuel. The house took fire and burned up. Burned what up? Burn is an intransitive verb. It would not trouble the unfortunate tenant to know that there must be an object burned, or what it was. He would find it far more difficult to rebuild his house. Do you suppose fires never burn any thing belonging to neuter verb folks? Then they never need pay away insurance money. With the solitary exception I have mentioned—the burning bush—this verb can not be intransitive.
The sun shines.
This is an intransitive verb if there ever was one, because the object is not often expressed after it. But if the sun emits no rays of light, how shall it be known whether it shines or not? "The radiance of the sun's bright beaming" is produced by the exhibition of itself, when it brightens the objects exposed to its rays or radiance. We talk of sun shine and moon shine, but if these bodies never produce effects how shall it be known whether such things are real? Sun shine is the direct effect of the sun's shining. But clouds sometimes intervene and prevent the rays from extending to the earth; but then we do not say "the sun shines." You see at once, that all we know or can know of the fact we state as truth, is derived from a knowledge of the very effects which our grammars tell us do not exist. Strange logic indeed! It is a mark of a wiser man, and a better scholar, not to know the popular grammars, than it is to profess any degree of proficiency in them!
To smile.
The smiles of the morning, the smiles of affection, a smile of kindness, are only produced by the appearance of something that smiles upon us. Smiles are the direct consequence of smiling. If a person should smile ever so sweetly and yet present no smiles, they might, for aught we could know to the contrary, be sour as vinegar.