Go to Nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thoughts but how best to penetrate her meaning, and remember her instruction; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing; believing all things to be right and good, and rejoicing always in the truth." And at Coventry Patmore's request he went to the Academy to look at the pictures in question.

Yes; the faces were ugly: Millais' "Mariana" was a piece of idolatrous Papistry, and there was a mistake in the perspective.

Collins' "Convent Thoughts"-- more Popery; but very careful--"the tadpole too small for its age"; but what studies of plants! And there was his own "Alisma Plantago," which he had been drawing for "Stones of Venice" (vol.i., plate 7) and describing: "The lines through its body, which are of peculiar beauty, mark the different expansions of its fibres, and are, I think, exactly the same as those which would be traced by the currents of a river entering a lake of the shape of the leaf, at the end where the stalk is, and passing out at its point." Curvature was one of the special subjects of Ruskin, the one he found most neglected by ordinary artists.

The "Alisma" was a test of observation and draughtsmanship.

He had never seen it so thoroughly or so well drawn, and heartily wished the study were his.
Looking again at the other works of the school, he found that the one mistake in the "Mariana" was the only error in perspective in the whole series of pictures; which could not be said of any twelve works, containing architecture, by popular artists in the exhibition; and that, as studies both of drapery and of every other minor detail, there had been nothing in art so earnest or so complete as these pictures since the days of Albert Duerer.
He went home, and wrote his verdict in a letter to _The Times_ (May 9, 1851).