Virginia Woolf – Essays

but what art can the essayist use in these short lengths of prose to sting us wide awake and fix us in a trance which is not sleep but rather an intensification of life—a basking, with every faculty alert, in the sun of pleasure? He must know—that is the first essential—how to write.

Everything in an essay must be subdued to that end. It should lay us under a spell with its first word, and we should only wake, refreshed, with its last.

Cowley’s essay “Of Myself” is a model of what these little compositions should be.

Abraham Cowley wrote eleven “Several Discourses by way of Essays,”

was too delicate to tempt an imitator.

while “undigested” is the last epithet to be applied to the essays of Montaigne, Addison or Lamb