The following lyrics and footnote are from The Harp of Erin edited by Ralph Varian (Dublin: M'Glashan & Gill, 1869), page 23:

AMONG THE HEATHER.*
William Allingham.

One evening walking out, I o'ertook a modest colleen,
When the wind was blowing cool, and the harvest leaves were falling.
"Is our road, by chance, the same? Might we travel on together?"
"O, I keep the mountain side," she replied, "among the heather."

"Your mountain air is sweet, when the days are long and sunny,
When the grass grows round the rocks, and the whinbloom smells like honey;
But the winter's coming fast, with its foggy snowy weather,
And you'll find it bleak and chill on your hill, among the heather."

She praised her mountain home; and I'll praise it, too, with reason,
For where Molly is, there's sunshine and flowers at every season.
Be the moorland black or white, does it signify a feather,
Now I know the way by heart, every part, among the heather?

The sun goes down in haste, and the night falls thick and stormy;
Yet I'd travel twenty miles to the welcome that's before me;
Singing hi for Eskydun, in the teeth of wind and weather!
Love'll warm me as I go through the snow, among the heather.

* There is an old Ulster song which opens thus:—

As I was coming home from the fair of Ballymally, O!
I met a comely lass, she was fairer than Diana, O;
I asked her where she lived, as we roved on together, O,
"The bonnie mountain high (she replied) among the heather, O!',

Mr. Allingham, with the instinct of a true poet, has seized this strain, and made it into a perfect little poem.

[The oldest copy I could find is in The Dublin University Magazine, Vol. 50 No. 300, Dec., 1857, page 652.]