Much less provocation will set it a-walking;
But the odds that foiled Hercules foiled Paddywhack.
They floored him, they seized him, they stripped him, alack!
Up, bubboo! He hadn’t a shirt to his back!”
Mankind has been hunting the four-leaved shamrock from the very earliest times on record. I believe half the legends of mythology, half the exploits of history, half the discoveries of science, originate in the universal search. Jason was looking for it with his Argonauts when he stumbled on the Golden Fleece; Columbus sailed after it in the track of the setting sun, scanning that bare horizon of an endless ocean, day after day, with sinking heart yet never-failing courage, till the land-weeds drifting round his prow, the land-birds perching on his spars, brought him their joyous welcome from the undiscovered shore; Alexander traversed Asia in his desire for it; Cæsar dashed through the Rubicon in its pursuit; Napoleon well-nigh grasped it after Austerlitz, but the frosts and fires of Moscow shrivelled it into nothing ere his hand could close upon the prize. To find it, sages have ransacked their libraries, adepts exhausted their alembics, misers hoarded up their gold. It is not twined with the poet’s bay-leaves, nor is it concealed in the madman’s hellebore. People have been for it to the Great Desert, the Blue Mountains, the Chinese capital, the interior of Africa, and returned empty-handed as they went. It abhors courts, camps, and cities; it strikes no root in palace nor in castle; and if more likely to turn up in a cottage-garden, who has yet discovered the humble plot of ground on which it grows?
Nevertheless, undeterred by warning, example, and the experience of repeated failures, human nature relaxes nothing of its persevering quest. I have seen a dog persist in chasing swallows as they skimmed along the lawn; but then the dog had once caught a wounded bird, and was therefore acting on an assured and tried experience of its own. If you or I had ever found one four-leaved shamrock, we should be justified in cherishing a vague hope that we might some day light upon another.
The Knights of the Round Table beheld with their own eyes that vision of the Holy Vessel, descending in their midst, which scattered those steel-clad heroes in all directions on the adventure of the Sangreal; but perhaps the very vows of chivalry they had registered, the very exploits they performed, originated with that restless longing they could not but acknowledge in common with all mankind for possession of the four-leaved shamrock.
“And better he loved, that monarch bold,
On venturous quest to ride
In mail and plate, by wood and wold,