And the world’s warm breast is in verdure dressed,
Go, stand on the hill where they lie.
The earliest ray of the golden day
On that hallowed spot is cast,
And the evening sun, as he leaves the world,
Looks kindly on that spot last.”
—Pierpont.
No spot in Plymouth is so interesting to the antiquary as Burial Hill. Here are the sites of the Pilgrims’ fort and watch-tower. Here sleep the early settlers of the colony, the heroes of the Revolution and of our later wars, and the men who went “down to the sea in ships” and braved dangers, in the days of Plymouth’s maritime glory. Here are to be seen the rude symbols of the sculptor’s art and the crude effusions of the elegiac poet.
Burial Hill is 165 feet above the sea level, and rises abruptly just back of the town’s busiest thoroughfare. It is irregular in form and contains about eight acres. From this elevation the visitor has a splendid panorama of ocean and country. Nestling at his feet, between the hill and the sea, are the thickly clustering roofs of the old town. Turning his eyes northward, he sees in the far distance the villages of Kingston and Duxbury and the monument on Captain’s Hill, erected in memory of Myles Standish, the doughty Pilgrim commander. To the west stretches a rolling swell of hills, ending in an almost unbroken forest, through whose shades Massasoit led his warriors to meet the Plymouth colonists. On the south, shrouded in purple mist, are the “Pine Hills” of Manomet. Looking eastward, across the bay he spies the green dot known as Clark’s Island, where the Pilgrims spent their first Sabbath; and far beyond the shining strand of Plymouth Beach, if the day be clear and his vision keen, he can just discern Provincetown, at the point of Cape Cod,—the “tip end of Yankee-land.”