the twopence coloured

Reposting from Minz, for easier retrieval:

Oddly it might seem, in view of my romantic disposition, I was beginning to prefer Aristotle to Plato. Which is perhaps not so odd after all. It was Shelley, the most Platonising of our poets, who wrote:

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,

Whereas people like myself must always prefer the twopence coloured to even the pound plain. For all his famous dryness, Aristotle, being among other things a zoologist, never let transcendental radiance destroy the shapes of the creatures or impose a white-out on everything.

- From the Selected Prose of Louis MacNeice.