Marcus Aurelius has been lauded for his capacity "to write down what was in his heart just as it was, not obscured by any consciousness of the presence of listeners or any striving after effect." Gilbert Murray compares the work to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "Confessions" and St. Augustine's "Confessions". Though Murray criticizes Marcus for the "harshness and plainness of his literary style", he finds in his "Meditations" "as much intensity of feeling...as in most of the nobler modern books of religion, only a sterner power controlling it." "People fail to understand Marcus," he writes, "not because of his lack of self-expression, but because it is hard for most men to breathe at that intense height of spiritual life, or, at least, to breathe soberly."