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Quick Start Guide to Large Language Models Second
Edition Sinan Ozdemir Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Sinan Ozdemir
ISBN(s): 9780135346570, 0135346576
File Details: PDF, 20.05 MB
Year: 2024
Language: english
Quick Start Guide to Large
Language Models, Second
Edition
Sinan Ozdemir

A NOTE FOR EARLY RELEASE READERS

With Early Release eBooks, you get books in their earliest
form—the author’s raw and unedited content as they write—
so you can take advantage of these technologies long
before the official release of these titles.
If you have comments about how we might improve the
content and/or examples in this book, or if you notice
missing material within this title, please reach out to
Pearson at PearsonITAcademics@pearson.com
Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
About the Author

Part I: Introduction to Large Language Models

Chapter 1: Introduction to Large Language Models
Chapter 2: Semantic Search with LLMs
Chapter 3: First Steps with Prompt Engineering
Chapter 4: The LLM/AI Ecosystem--RAG + Agent
Case Study

Part II: Getting the Most Out of LLMs

Chapter 5: Optimizing LLMs with Customized Fine-
Tuning
Chapter 6: Advanced Prompt Engineering
Chapter 7: Customizing Embeddings and Model
Architectures
Chapter 8: Alignment First Principles

Part III: Advanced LLM Usage

Chapter 9: Moving Beyond Foundation Models
Chapter 10: Advanced Open-Source LLM Fine
Tuning
Chapter 11: Moving LLMs into Production
Chapter 12: Evaluating LLMs/LLMOps
Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
About the Author

Part I: Introduction to Large Language Models

1. Overview of Large Language Models
Introduction
What Are Large Language Models?
Popular Modern LLMs
Domain-Specific LLMs
Applications of LLMs
Summary
2. Semantic Search with LLMs
Introduction
The Task
Solution Overview
The Components
Putting It All Together
The Cost of Closed-Source Components
Summary
3. First Steps with Prompt Engineering
Introduction
Prompt Engineering
 Working with Prompts Across Models
Summary
4. The AI Ecosystem—Putting the Pieces Together
Introduction
The Ever-Shifting Performance of Closed-
Source AI
AI Reasoning versus Thinking
Case Study 1: Retrieval Augmented
Generation (RAG)
Case Study 2: Automated AI Agents
Conclusion

Part II: Getting the Most Out of LLMs

5. Optimizing LLMs with Customized Fine-Tuning
6. Advanced Prompt Engineering
7. Customizing Embeddings and Model
Architectures
8. AI Alignment: First Principles
Introduction
Aligned to Whom and to What End?
Alignment as a Bias Mitigator
The Pillars of Alignment
Constitutional AI—A Step Toward Self-
Alignment
Conclusion

Part III: Advanced LLM Usage

9. Moving Beyond Foundation Models
10. Advanced Open-Source LLM Fine Tuning
11. Moving LLMs into Production
12. Evaluating LLMs
Introduction
Evaluating Generative Tasks
Evaluating Understanding Tasks
Conclusion
Keep Going!
 Preface
This content is currently in development.
 Acknowledgments
This content is currently in development.
 About the Author
This content is currently in development.
 Part I
Introduction to Large
Language Models
1. Overview of Large
Language Models

Introduction
In 2017, a team at Google Brain introduced an advanced
artificial intelligence (AI) deep learning model called the
Transformer. Since then, the Transformer has become the
standard for tackling various natural language processing
(NLP) tasks in academia and industry. It is likely that you
have interacted with the Transformer model in recent years
without even realizing it, as Google uses BERT to enhance
its search engine by better understanding users’ search
queries. The GPT family of models from OpenAI have also
received attention for their ability to generate human-like
text and images.

Note
We cannot fit all of the ever-shifting code for this book
within these pages so to get the always free and update
to code, check out our github repo at
https://github.com/sinanuozdemir/quick-start-guide-to-
llms.
These Transformers now power applications such as
GitHub’s Copilot (developed by OpenAI in collaboration with
Microsoft), which can convert comments and snippets of
code into fully functioning source code that can even call
upon other large language models (LLMs) (as in Listing 1.1)
to perform NLP tasks.

Listing 1.1 Using the Copilot LLM to get an output

from Facebook’s BART LLM
from transformers import pipeline

def classify_text(email):
“””
Use Facebook’s BART model to classify an email

Args:
email (str): The email to classify
Returns:
str: The classification of the email
“””
# COPILOT START. EVERYTHING BEFORE THIS COMMENT
classifier = pipeline(
‘zero-shot-classification’, model=’facebook/bar
labels = [‘spam’, ‘not spam’]
hypothesis_template = ‘This email is {}.’

results = classifier(
email, labels, hypothesis_template=hypothesis_t

return results[‘labels’][0]
# COPILOT END
In Listing 1.1, I used Copilot to take in only a Python function
definition and some comments I wrote, and I wrote all of the
code to make the function do what I wrote. There’s no
cherry-picking here, just a fully working Python function that
I can call like this:
classify_text(‘hi I am spam’) # spam

It appears we are surrounded by LLMs, but just what are

they doing under the hood? Let’s find out!

What Are Large Language Models?

Large language models (LLMs) are AI models that are
usually (but not necessarily) derived from the Transformer
architecture and are designed to understand and generate
human language, code, and much more. These models are
trained on vast amounts of text data, allowing them to
capture the complexities and nuances of human language.
LLMs can perform a wide range of language-related tasks,
from simple text classification to text generation, with high
accuracy, fluency, and style.
In the healthcare industry, LLMs are being used for
electronic medical record (EMR) processing, clinical trial
matching, and drug discovery. In finance, they are being
utilized for fraud detection, sentiment analysis of financial
news, and even trading strategies. LLMs are also used for
customer service automation via chatbots and virtual
assistants. Owing to their versatility and highly performant
natures, Transformer-based LLMs are becoming an
increasingly valuable asset in a variety of industries and
applications.

Note
 I will use the term understand a fair amount in this text.
In this context, I am usually referring to “natural
language understanding” (NLU)—a research branch of
NLP that focuses on developing algorithms and models
that can accurately interpret human language. As we
will see, NLU models excel at tasks such as
classification, sentiment analysis, and named entity
recognition. However, it is important to note that while
these models can perform complex language tasks, they
do not possess true understanding in the same way that
humans do.

The success of LLMs and Transformers is due to the

combination of several ideas. Most of these ideas had been
around for years but were also being actively researched
around the same time. Mechanisms such as attention,
transfer learning, and scaling up neural networks, which
provide the scaffolding for Transformers, were seeing
breakthroughs right around the same time. Figure 1.1
outlines some of the biggest advancements in NLP in the
last few decades, all leading up to the invention of the
Transformer.
 Figure 1.1 A brief history of modern NLP highlights the
use of deep learning to tackle language modeling,
advancements in large-scale semantic token
embeddings (Word2vec), sequence-to-sequence models
with attention (something we will see in more depth
later in this chapter), and finally the Transformer in
2017.

The Transformer architecture itself is quite impressive. It can

be highly parallelized and scaled in ways that previous
state-of-the-art NLP models could not be, allowing it to scale
to much larger datasets and training times than was
possible with previous NLP models. The Transformer uses a
special kind of attention calculation called self-attention to
allow each word in a sequence to “attend to” (look to for
context) all other words in the sequence, enabling it to
capture long-range dependencies and contextual
relationships between words. Of course, no architecture is
perfect. Transformers are still limited to an input context
window, which represents the maximum length of text they
can process at any given moment.
Since the advent of the Transformer architecture in 2017,
the ecosystem around using and deploying Transformers
has exploded. The aptly named “Transformers” library and
its supporting packages have enabled practitioners to use,
train, and share models, greatly accelerating this model’s
adoption, to the point that it is now being used by
thousands of organizations (and counting). Popular LLM
repositories such as Hugging Face have popped up,
providing access to powerful open-source models to the
masses. In short, using and productionizing a Transformer
has never been easier.
That’s where this book comes in.
My goal is to guide you on how to use, train, and optimize
all kinds of LLMs for practical applications while giving you
just enough insight into the inner workings of the model to
know how to make optimal decisions about model choice,
data format, fine-tuning parameters, and so much more.
My aim is to make use of Transformers accessible for
software developers, data scientists, analysts, and hobbyists
alike. To do that, we should start on a level playing field and
learn a bit more about LLMs.

Definition of LLMs
To back up only slightly, we should talk first about the
specific NLP task that LLMs and Transformers are being used
to solve, which provides the foundation layer for their ability
to solve a multitude of tasks. Language modeling is a
subfield of NLP that involves the creation of statistical/deep
learning models for predicting the likelihood of a sequence
of tokens in a specified vocabulary (a limited and known
set of tokens). There are generally two kinds of language
modeling tasks out there: autoencoding tasks and
autoregressive tasks (Figure 1.2).
 Figure 1.2 Both the autoencoding and autoregressive
language modeling tasks involve filling in a missing
token, but only the autoencoding task allows for context
to be seen on both sides of the missing token.

Note
A token is the smallest unit of semantic meaning, which
is created by breaking down a sentence or piece of text
into smaller units; it is the basic input for an LLM. Tokens
can be words but also can be “sub-words,” as we will
see in more depth throughout this book. Some readers
may be familiar with the term “n-gram,” which refers to
a sequence of n consecutive tokens.

Autoregressive language models are trained to predict the

next token in a sentence, based on only the previous tokens
in the phrase. These models correspond to the decoder part
of the Transformer model, with a mask being applied to the
full sentence so that the attention heads can see only the
tokens that came before. Autoregressive models are ideal
for text generation. A good example of this type of model is
GPT.
Autoencoding language models are trained to reconstruct
the original sentence from a corrupted version of the input.
These models correspond to the encoder part of the
Transformer model and have access to the full input without
any mask. Autoencoding models create a bidirectional
representation of the whole sentence. They can be fine-
tuned for a variety of tasks such as text generation, but
their main application is sentence classification or token
classification. A typical example of this type of model is
BERT.
To summarize, LLMs are language models may be either
autoregressive, autoencoding, or a combination of the two.
Modern LLMs are usually based on the Transformer
architecture (which we will use in this book), but can also be
based on another architecture. The defining features of
LLMs are their large size and large training datasets, which
enable them to perform complex language tasks, such as
text generation and classification, with high accuracy and
with little to no fine-tuning.
For now, let’s look at some of the popular LLMs we’ll be
using throughout this book.

Popular Modern LLMs

BERT, GPT, T5, and Llama are four popular LLMs developed
by Google, OpenAI, Google, and Meta respectively. These
models differ quite dramatically in terms of their
architecture, even though they all share the Transformer as
a common ancestor. Other widely used variants of LLMs in
the Transformer family include RoBERTa, BART (which we
saw earlier performing some text classification), and
ELECTRA.

BERT
BERT (Figure 1.3) is an autoencoding model that uses
attention to build a bidirectional representation of a
sentence. This approach makes it ideal for sentence
classification and token classification tasks.
 Figure 1.3 BERT was one of the first LLMs and
continues to be popular for many NLP tasks that involve
fast processing of large amounts of text.

BERT uses the encoder of the Transformer and ignores the

decoder to become exceedingly good at
processing/understanding massive amounts of text very
quickly relative to other, slower LLMs that focus on
generating text one token at a time. BERT-derived
architectures, therefore, are best for working with and
analyzing large corpora quickly when we don’t need to write
free-text.
BERT itself doesn’t classify text or summarize documents,
but it is often used as a pre-trained model for downstream
NLP tasks. BERT has become a widely used and highly
regarded LLM in the NLP community, paving the way for the
development of even more advanced language models.

The GPT Family and ChatGPT

GPT (Figure 1.4), in contrast to BERT, is an autoregressive
model that uses attention to predict the next token in a
sequence based on the previous tokens. The GPT family of
algorithms (which include ChatGPT and GPT-4) is primarily
used for text generation and has been known for its ability
to generate natural-sounding, human-like text.

Figure 1.4 The GPT family of models excels at

generating free-text aligned with the user’s intent.

GPT relies on the decoder portion of the Transformer and

ignores the encoder, so it is exceptionally good at
generating text one token at a time. GPT-based models are
best for generating text given a rather large context
window. They can also be used to process/understand text,
as we will see later in this book. GPT-derived architectures
are ideal for applications that require the ability to freely
write text.

T5
T5 is a pure encoder/decoder Transformer model that was
designed to perform several NLP tasks, from text
classification to text summarization and generation, right off
the shelf. It is one of the first popular models to be able to
boast of such a feat, in fact. Before T5, LLMs like BERT and
GPT-2 generally had to be fine-tuned using labeled data
before they could be relied on to perform such specific
tasks.
T5 uses both the encoder and the decoder of the
Transformer, so it is highly versatile in both processing and
generating text. T5-based models can perform a wide range
of NLP tasks, from text classification to text generation, due
to their ability to build representations of the input text
using the encoder and generate text using the decoder
(Figure 1.5). T5-derived architectures are ideal for
applications that “require both the ability to process and
understand text and the ability to generate text freely.”

Figure 1.5 T5 was one of the first LLMs to show

promise in solving multiple tasks at once without any
fine-tuning.
T5’s ability to perform multiple tasks with no fine-tuning
spurred the development of other versatile LLMs that can
perform multiple tasks with efficiency and accuracy with
little or no fine-tuning. GPT-3, released around the same
time as T5, also boasted this ability but was closed source
and under OpenAI’s control.
More modern open source LLMs like Llama (seen in Figure
1.6) pop up seemingly by the day and represent a wonderful
and massive shift towards a more open and transparent
community of AI. This shift is not without speedbumps,
however. Even Llama – considered one of the most powerful
open-source family of auto-regressive models – is not 100%
open. To download the parameter weights you must agree
to a relatively strict license, and we do not have access to
the training data nor the code they used to make the model.

Figure 1.6 The Llama family of models is considered

one of the more powerful (mostly) open-source families
of LLMs, trained on trillions of tokens and ready to be
fine-tuned for specific tasks.

Nearly all LLMs are highly versatile and are used for various
NLP tasks, such as text classification, text generation,
machine translation, and sentiment analysis, among others.
These LLMs, along with flavors (variants) of them, will be the
main focus of this book and our applications.
Table 1.1 shows the disk size, memory usage, number of
parameters – the internal numbers that make up the
matrices of the deep learning architecture itself, and
approximate size of the pre-training data for several popular
LLMs. Note that these sizes are approximate and may vary
depending on the specific implementation and hardware
used.

Table 1.1 Comparison of Popular Large Language

Models
But size isn’t everything. Let’s look at some of the key
characteristics of LLMs and then dive into how they learn to
read and write.

Key Characteristics of LLMs

The original Transformer architecture, as devised in 2017,
was a sequence-to-sequence model, which means it had
two main components:
An encoder, which is tasked with taking in raw text,
splitting it up into its core components (more on this
later), converting those components into vectors
(similar to the Word2vec process), and using attention
to understand the context of the text
A decoder, which excels at generating text by using a
modified type of attention to predict the next best token
As shown in Figure 1.7, the Transformer has many other
subcomponents (which we won’t get into) that promote
faster training, generalizability, and better performance.
Today’s LLMs are, for the most part, variants of the original
Transformer. Models like BERT and GPT dissect the
Transformer into only an encoder and a decoder
(respectively) so as to build models that excel in
understanding and generating (also respectively).
 Figure 1.7 The original Transformer has two main
components: an encoder, which is great at
understanding text, and a decoder, which is great at
generating text. Putting them together makes the entire
model a “sequence-to-sequence” model.

As mentioned earlier, in general, LLMs can be categorized

into three main buckets:
Autoregressive models, such as GPT, which predict
the next token in a sentence based on the previous
tokens. These LLMs are effective at generating coherent
free-text following a given context.
Autoencoding models, such as BERT, which build a
bidirectional representation of a sentence by masking
some of the input tokens and trying to predict them
from the remaining ones. These LLMs are adept at
capturing contextual relationships between tokens
quickly and at scale, which makes them great
candidates for text classification tasks, for example.
Combinations of autoregressive and autoencoding,
such as T5, which can use the encoder and decoder to
be more versatile and flexible in generating text. Such
combination models can generate more diverse and
creative text in different contexts compared to pure
decoder-based autoregressive models due to their
ability to capture additional context using the encoder.
Figure 1.8 shows the breakdown of the key characteristics of
LLMs based on these three buckets.
 Figure 1.8 A breakdown of the key characteristics of
LLMs based on how they are derived from the original
Transformer architecture.

More Context, Please

No matter how the LLM is constructed and which parts of
the Transformer it is using, they all care about context
(Figure 1.9). The goal is to understand each token as it
relates to the other tokens in the input text. Since the
introduction of Word2vec around 2013, NLP practitioners
and researchers have been curious about the best ways of
combining semantic meaning (basically, word definitions)
and context (with the surrounding tokens) to create the
most meaningful token embeddings possible. The
Transformer relies on the attention calculation to make this
combination a reality.
 Figure 1.9 LLMs are great at understanding context.
The word “Python” can have different meanings
depending on the context. We could be talking about a
snake or a pretty cool coding language.

Choosing what kind of Transformer you want isn’t enough.

Just choosing the encoder doesn’t mean your Transformer
magically becomes good at understanding text. Let’s look at
how these LLMs actually learn to read and write.

How LLMs Work

How an LLM is pre-trained and fine-tuned makes all the
difference between an okay-performing model and a state-
of-the-art, highly accurate LLM. We’ll need to take a quick
look into how LLMs are pre-trained to understand what they
are good at, what they are bad at, and whether we would
need to update them with our own custom data.
Pre-training
Every LLM on the market has been pre-trained on a large
corpus of text data and on specific language modeling-
related tasks. During pre-training, the LLM tries to learn and
understand general language and relationships between
words. Every LLM is trained on different corpora and on
different tasks.
BERT, for example, was originally pre-trained on two publicly
available text corpora (Figure 1.10):
English Wikipedia: a collection of articles from the
English version of Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia.
It contains a range of topics and writing styles, making it
a diverse and representative sample of English
language text (at the time, 2.5 billion words).
The BookCorpus: a large collection of fiction and
nonfiction books. It was created by scraping book text
from the web and includes a range of genres, from
romance and mystery to science fiction and history. The
books in the corpus were selected to have a minimum
length of 2000 words and to be written in English by
authors with verified identities (approximately 800
million words in total).
 Figure 1.10 BERT was originally pre-trained on English
Wikipedia and the BookCorpus. More modern LLMs are
trained on datasets thousands of times larger.

BERT was also pre-trained on two specific language

modeling tasks (Figure 1.11):
 Masked Language Modeling (MLM) task (autoencoding
task): helps BERT recognize token interactions within a
single sentence.
Next Sentence Prediction (NSP) task: helps BERT
understand how tokens interact with each other
between sentences.

Figure 1.11 BERT was pre-trained on two tasks: the

autoencoding language modeling task (referred to as
the “masked language modeling” task) to teach it
individual word embeddings and the “next sentence
prediction” task to help it learn to embed entire
sequences of text.

Pre-training on these corpora allowed BERT (mainly via the

self-attention mechanism) to learn a rich set of language
features and contextual relationships. The use of large,
diverse corpora like these has become a common practice
in NLP research, as it has been shown to improve the
performance of models on downstream tasks.

Note
 The pre-training process for an LLM can evolve over
time as researchers find better ways of training LLMs
and phase out methods that don’t help as much. For
example, within a year of the original Google BERT
release that used the NSP pre-training task, a BERT
variant called RoBERTa (yes, most of these LLM names
will be fun) by Facebook AI was shown to not require the
NSP task to match and even beat the original BERT
model’s performance in several areas.

BERT, as we now know, is an auto-encoding model so it’s

pretraining will be different than how, say Llama-3 is
pretrained. Instead of MLM and NSP, auto- regressive
models are pretrained simply on the auto-regressive
language modeling task over a predefined corpus of data.
Put another way, pretraining models like Llama-3 just mean
that they read vast amounts of unstructured text mostly
from the internet and trained to emulate the language as
closely as possible.
Depending on which LLM you decide to use, it will likely be
pre-trained differently from the rest. This is what sets LLMs
apart from each other. Some LLMs are trained on proprietary
data sources, including OpenAI’s GPT family of models, to
give their parent companies an edge over their competitors.
We won’t revisit the idea of pre-training often in this book
because it’s not exactly the “quick” part of a “quick start
guide.” Nevertheless, it can be worth knowing how these
models were pre-trained because this pre-training enables
us to apply transfer learning, which lets us achieve the
state-of-the-art results we want—which is a big deal!

Transfer Learning
Transfer learning is a technique used in machine learning to
leverage the knowledge gained from one task to improve
performance on another related task. Transfer learning for
LLMs involves taking an LLM that has been pre-trained on
one corpus of text data and then fine-tuning it for a specific
“downstream” task, such as text classification or text
generation, by updating the model’s parameters with task-
specific data.
The idea behind transfer learning is that the pre-trained
model has already learned a lot of information about the
language and relationships between words, and this
information can be used as a starting point to improve
performance on a new task. Transfer learning allows LLMs to
be fine-tuned for specific tasks with much smaller amounts
of task-specific data than would be required if the model
were trained from scratch. This greatly reduces the amount
of time and resources needed to train LLMs. Figure 1.12
provides a visual representation of this relationship.
 Figure 1.12 The general transfer learning loop involves
pre-training a model on a generic dataset on some
generic self-supervised task and then fine-tuning the
model on a task-specific dataset.

Fine-Tuning
Once an LLM has been pre-trained, it can be fine-tuned for
specific tasks. Fine-tuning involves training the LLM on a
smaller, task-specific dataset to adjust its parameters for
the specific task at hand. This allows the LLM to leverage its
pre-trained knowledge of the language to improve its
accuracy for the specific task. Fine-tuning has been shown
to drastically improve performance on domain-specific and
task-specific tasks and lets LLMs adapt quickly to a wide
variety of NLP applications.
Figure 1.13 shows the basic fine-tuning loop that we will use
for our models in later chapters. Whether they are open-
source or closed-source, the loop is more or less the same:
1. We define the model we want to fine-tune as well as
any fine-tuning parameters (e.g., learning rate).
2. We aggregate some training data (the format and
other characteristics depend on the model we are
updating).
3. We compute losses (a measure of error) and gradients
(information about how to change the model to
minimize error).
4. We update the model through backpropagation—a
mechanism to update model parameters to minimize
errors.
 Figure 1.13 The Transformers package from Hugging
Face provides a neat and clean interface for training and
fine-tuning LLMs.

If some of that went over your head, not to worry: We will

rely on prebuilt tools from Hugging Face’s Transformers
package (Figure 1.9) and OpenAI’s Fine-Tuning API to
abstract away a lot of this so we can really focus on our data
and our models.

Note
You will not need a Hugging Face account or key to
follow along and use any of the code in this book, apart
from the very specific advanced exercises where I will
call it out.

Attention
The title of the original paper that introduced the
Transformer was “Attention Is All You Need.” Attention is a
mechanism used in deep learning models (not just
Transformers) that assigns different weights to different
parts of the input, allowing the model to prioritize and
emphasize the most important information while performing
tasks like translation or summarization. Essentially,
attention allows a model to “focus” on different parts of the
input dynamically, leading to improved performance and
more accurate results. Before the popularization of
attention, most neural networks processed all inputs equally
and the models relied on a fixed representation of the input
to make predictions. Modern LLMs that rely on attention can
dynamically focus on different parts of input sequences,
allowing them to weigh the importance of each part in
making predictions.
To recap, LLMs are pre-trained on large corpora and
sometimes fine-tuned on smaller datasets for specific tasks.
Recall that one of the factors behind the Transformer’s
effectiveness as a language model is that it is highly
parallelizable, allowing for faster training and efficient
processing of text. What really sets the Transformer apart
from other deep learning architectures is its ability to
capture long-range dependencies and relationships between
tokens using attention. In other words, attention is a crucial
component of Transformer-based LLMs, and it enables them
to effectively retain information between training loops and
tasks (i.e., transfer learning), while being able to process
lengthy swatches of text with ease.
Attention is considered the aspect most responsible for
helping LLMs learn (or at least recognize) internal world
models and human-identifiable rules. A Stanford University
study conducted in 2019 showed that certain attention
calculations in BERT corresponded to linguistic notions of
syntax and grammar rules. For example, the researchers
noticed that BERT was able to notice direct objects of verbs,
determiners of nouns, and objects of prepositions with
remarkably high accuracy from only its pre-training. These
relationships are presented visually in Figure 1.14.
 Figure 1.14 Research has probed into LLMs and
revealed that they seem to be recognizing grammatical
rules even when they were never explicitly told these
rules.

Other research has explored which other kinds of “rules”

LLMs are able to learn simply by pre-training and fine-
tuning. One example is a series of experiments led by
researchers at Harvard University that explored an LLM’s
ability to learn a set of rules for a synthetic task like the
game of Othello (Figure 1.15). They found evidence that an
LLM was able to understand the rules of the game simply by
training on historical move data.
 Figure 1.15 LLMs may be able to learn all kinds of
things about the world, whether it be the rules and
strategy of a game or the rules of human language.

For any LLM to learn any kind of rule, however, it has to

convert what we perceive as text into something machine
readable. This is done through the process of embedding.

Embeddings
Embeddings are the mathematical representations of
words, phrases, or tokens in a large-dimensional space. In
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 I had forgotten to speak of the Christmas-dinner, that solid feast of fat
things, on which we also luxuriated. Mrs. Crowfield outdid all household
traditions in that feast: the turkey and the chickens, the jellies and the
sauces, the pies and the pudding, behold, are they not written in the tablets
of Memory which remain to this day?
The holidays passed away hilariously, and at New-Year’s I, according to
time-honored custom, went forth to make my calls and see my fair friends,
while my wife and daughters stayed at home to dispense the hospitalities of
the day to their gentlemen friends. All was merry, cheerful, and it was
agreed on all hands that a more joyous holiday season had never flown over
us.
But, somehow, the week after, I began to be sensible of a running-down
in the wheels. I had an article to write for the “Atlantic,” but felt mopish
and could not write. My dinner had not its usual relish, and I had an
indefinite sense everywhere of something going wrong. My coal bill came
in, and I felt sure we were being extravagant, and that our John Furnace
wasted the coal. My grandsons and granddaughters came to see us, and I
discovered that they had high-pitched voices, and burst in without wiping
their shoes, and it suddenly occurred powerfully to my mind that they were
not being well brought up,—evidently, they were growing up rude and
noisy. I discovered several tumblers and plates with the edges chipped, and
made bitter reflections on the carelessness of Irish servants;—our crockery
was going to destruction, along with the rest. Then, on opening one of my
paper-drawers, I found that Jennie’s one drawer of worsted had overflowed
into two or three; Jennie was growing careless; besides, worsted is dear, and
girls knit away small fortunes, without knowing it, on little duds that do
nobody any good. Moreover, Maggie had three times put my slippers into
the hall-closet, instead of leaving them where I wanted, under my study-
table. Mrs. Crowfield ought to look after things more; every servant, from
end to end of the house, was getting out of the traces, it was strange she did
not see it.
All this I vented, from time to time, in short, crusty sayings and doings,
as freely as if I hadn’t just written an article on “Little Foxes” in the last
“Atlantic,” till at length my eyes were opened on my own state and
condition.
 It was evening, and I had just laid up the fire in the most approved style
of architecture, and, projecting my feet into my slippers, sat spitefully
cutting the leaves of a caustic review.
Mrs. Crowfield took the tongs and altered the disposition of a stick.
“My dear,” I said, “I do wish you’d let the fire alone,—you always put it
out.”
“I was merely admitting a little air between the sticks,” said my wife.
“You always make matters worse, when you touch the fire.”
As if in contradiction, a bright tongue of flame darted up between the
sticks, and the fire began chattering and snapping defiance at me. Now, if
there’s anything which would provoke a saint, it is to be jeered and snapped
at in that way by a man’s own fire. It’s an unbearable impertinence. I threw
out my leg impatiently, and hit Rover, who yelped a yelp that finished the
upset of my nerves. I gave him a hearty kick, that he might have something
to yelp for, and in the movement upset Jennie’s embroidery-basket.
“Oh, papa!”
“Confound your baskets and balls! they are everywhere, so that a man
can’t move; useless, wasteful things, too.”
“Wasteful?” said Jennie, coloring indignantly; for if there’s anything
Jennie piques herself upon, it’s economy.
“Yes, wasteful,—wasting time and money both. Here are hundreds of
shivering poor to be clothed, and Christian females sit and do nothing but
crochet worsted into useless knicknacks. If they would be working for the
poor, there would be some sense in it. But it’s all just alike, no real
Christianity in the world, nothing but organized selfishness and self-
indulgence.”
“My dear,” said Mrs. Crowfield, “you are not well to-night. Things are
not quite so desperate as they appear. You haven’t got over Christmas-
week.”
“I am well. Never was better. But I can see, I hope, what’s before my
eyes; and the fact is, Mrs. Crowfield, things must not go on as they are
going. There must be more care, more attention to details. There’s Maggie,
—that girl never does what she is told. You are too slack with her, Ma’am.
She will light the fire with the last paper, and she won’t put my slippers in
the right place; and I can’t have my study made the general catch-all and
menagerie for Rover and Jennie, and her baskets and balls, and for all the
family litter.”
Just at this moment I overheard a sort of aside from Jennie, who was
swelling with repressed indignation at my attack on her worsted. She sat
with her back to me, knitting energetically, and said, in a low, but very
decisive tone, as she twitched her yarn,—
“Now if I should talk in that way, people would call me cross,—and
that’s the whole of it.”
I pretended to be looking into the fire in an absent-minded state; but
Jennie’s words had started a new idea. Was that it? Was that the whole
matter? Was it, then, a fact, that the house, the servants, Jennie and her
worsteds, Rover and Mrs. Crowfield, were all going on pretty much as
usual, and that the only difficulty was that I was cross? How many times
had I encouraged Rover to lie just where he was lying when I kicked him!
How many times, in better moods, had I complimented Jennie on her neat
little fancy-works, and declared that I liked the social companionship of
ladies’ work-baskets among my papers! Yes, it was clear. After all, things
were much as they had been; only I was cross.
Cross. I put it to myself in that simple, old-fashioned word, instead of
saying that I was out of spirits, or nervous, or using any of the other smooth
phrases with which we good Christians cover up our little sins of temper.
“Here you are, Christopher,” said I to myself, “a literary man, with a
somewhat delicate nervous organization and a sensitive stomach, and you
have been eating like a sailor or a ploughman; you have been gallivanting
and merry-making and playing the boy for two weeks; up at all sorts of
irregular hours, and into all sorts of boyish performances; and the
consequence is, that, like a thoughtless young scapegrace, you have used up
in ten days the capital of nervous energy that was meant to last you ten
weeks. You can’t eat your cake and have it too, Christopher. When the
nervous-fluid, source of cheerfulness, giver of pleasant sensations and
pleasant views, is all spent, you can’t feel cheerful; things cannot look as
they did when you were full of life and vigor. When the tide is out, there is
nothing but unsightly, ill-smelling tide-mud, and you can’t help it; but you
can keep your senses,—you can know what is the matter with you,—you
can keep from visiting your overdose of Christmas mincepies and candies
and jocularities on the heads of Mrs. Crowfield, Rover, and Jennie, whether
in the form of virulent morality, pungent criticisms, or a free kick, such as
you just gave the poor brute.”
“Come here, Rover, poor dog!” said I, extending my hand to Rover, who
cowered at the farther corner of the room, eying me wistfully,—“come here,
you poor doggie, and make up with your master. There, there! Was his
master cross? Well, he knows it. We must forgive and forget, old boy,
mustn’t we?” And Rover nearly broke his own back and tore me to pieces
with his tumultuous tail-waggings.
“As for you, puss,” I said to Jennie, “I am much obliged to you for your
free suggestion. You must take my cynical moralities for what they are
worth, and put your little traps into as many of my drawers as you like.”
In short, I made it up handsomely all around,—even apologizing to Mrs.
Crowfield, who, by the by, has summered and wintered me so many years,
and knows all my little seams and crinkles so well, that she took my
irritable, unreasonable spirit as tranquilly as if I had been a baby cutting a
new tooth.
“Of course, Chris, I knew what the matter was; don’t disturb yourself,”
she said, as I began my apology; “we understand each other. But there is
one thing I have to say; and that is, that your article ought to be ready.”
“Ah, well, then,” said I, “like other great writers, I shall make capital of
my own sins, and treat of the second little family fox; and his name is—

I R R I TA B I L I T Y.

Irritability is, more than most unlovely states, a sin of the flesh. It is
not, like envy, malice, spite, revenge, a vice which we may suppose to
belong equally to an embodied or a disembodied spirit. In fact, it comes
nearer to being physical depravity than anything I know of. There are some
bodily states, some conditions of the nerves, such that we could not
conceive of even an angelic spirit confined in a body thus disordered as
being able to do any more than simply endure. It is a state of nervous
torture; and the attacks which the wretched victim makes on others are as
much a result of disease as the snapping and biting of a patient convulsed
with hydrophobia.
Then, again, there are other people who go through life loving and
beloved, desired in every circle, held up in the Church as examples of the
power of religion, who, after all, deserve no credit for these things. Their
spirits are lodged in an animal nature so tranquil, so cheerful, all the
sensations which come to them are so fresh and vigorous and pleasant, that
they cannot help viewing the world charitably and seeing everything
through a glorified medium. The ill-temper of others does not provoke
them; perplexing business never sets their nerves to vibrating; and all their
lives long they walk in the serene sunshine of perfect animal health.
Look at Rover there. He is never nervous, never cross, never snaps or
snarls, and is ready, the moment after the grossest affront, to wag the tail of
forgiveness,—all because kind Nature has put his dog’s body together so
that it always works harmoniously. If every person in the world were gifted
with a stomach and nerves like his, it would be a far better and happier
world, no doubt. The man said a good thing who made the remark, that the
foundation of all intellectual and moral worth must be laid in a good healthy
animal.
Now I think it is undeniable that the peace and happiness of the home-
circle are very generally much invaded by the recurrence in its members of
these states of bodily irritability. Every person, if he thinks the matter over,
will see that his condition in life, the character of his friends, his estimate of
their virtues and failings, his hopes and expectations, are all very much
modified by these things. Cannot we all remember going to bed as very ill-
used, persecuted individuals, all whose friends were unreasonable, whose
life was full of trials and crosses, and waking up on a bright bird-singing
morning to find all these illusions gone with the fogs of the night? Our
friends are nice people, after all; the little things that annoyed us look
ridiculous by bright sunshine and we are fortunate individuals.
The philosophy of life, then, as far as this matter is concerned, must
consist of two things: first, to keep ourselves out of irritable bodily states;
and, second, to understand and control these states, when we cannot ward
them off.
Of course, the first of these is the most important; and yet, of all things,
it seems to be least looked into and understood. We find abundant rules for
the government of the tongue and temper; it is a slough into which, John
Bunyan hath it, cart-loads of wholesome instructions have been thrown; but
how to get and keep that healthy state of brain, stomach, and nerves which
takes away the temptation to ill-temper and anger is a subject which moral
and religious teachers seem scarcely to touch upon.
Now, without running into technical, physiological language, it is
evident, as regards us human beings, that there is a power by which we live
and move and have our being,—by which the brain thinks and wills, the
stomach digests, the blood circulates, and all the different provinces of the
little man-kingdom do their work. This something—call it nervous fluid,
nervous power, vital energy, life-force, or anything else that you will—is a
perfectly understood, if not a definable thing. It is plain, too, that people
possess this force in very different degrees; some generating it as a high
pressure engine does steam, and using it constantly, with an apparently
inexhaustible flow and others who have little, and spend it quickly. We have
a common saying, that this or that person is soon used up. Now most
nervous irritable states of temper are the mere physics’ result of a used-up
condition. The person has overspent his nervous energy,—like a man who
should eat up on Monday the whole food which was to keep him for a
week, and go growling and faint through the other days; or the quantity of
nervous force which was wanted to carry on the whole system in all its
parts is seized on by some one monopolizing portion, and used up to the
loss and detriment of the rest. Thus, with men of letters, an exorbitant brain
expends on its own wreckings what belongs to the other offices of the body:
the stomach has nothing to carry on digestion; the secretions are badly
made; and the imperfectly assimilated nourishment, that is conveyed to
every little nerve and tissue, carries with it an acrid, irritating quality,
producing general restlessness and discomfort. So men and women go
struggling on through their threescore and ten years, scarcely one in a
thousand knowing through life that perfect balance of parts, that appropriate
harmony of energies, that make a healthy, kindly animal condition,
predisposing to cheerfulness and good-will.
We Americans are, in the first place, a nervous, excitable people.
Multitudes of children, probably the great majority in the upper walks of
life, are born into the world with weaknesses of the nervous organization, or
of the brain or stomach, which make them incapable of any strong
excitement or prolonged exertion without some lesion or derangement; so
that they are continually being checked, laid up, and made invalids in the
midst of their days. Life here in America is so fervid, so fast, our climate is
so stimulating, with its clear, bright skies, its rapid and sudden changes of
temperature, that the tendencies to nervous disease are constantly
aggravated.
Under these circumstances, unless men and women make a conscience, a
religion, of saving and sparing something of themselves expressly for
home-life and home-consumption, it must follow that home will often be
merely a sort of refuge for us to creep into when we are used up and
irritable.
Papa is up and off, after a hasty breakfast, and drives all day in his
business, putting into it all there is in him, letting it drink up brain and nerve
and body and soul, and coming home jaded and exhausted, so that he
cannot bear the cry of the baby, and the frolics and pattering of the nursery
seem horrid and needless confusion. The little ones say, in their plain
vernacular, “Papa is cross.”
Mamma goes out to a party that keeps her up till one or two in the
morning, breathes bad air, eats indigestible food, and the next day is so
nervous that every straw and thread in her domestic path is insufferable.
Papas that pursue business thus day after day, and mammas that go into
company, as it is called, night after night, what is there left in or of them to
make an agreeable fireside with, to brighten their home and inspire their
children?
True, the man says he cannot help himself,—business requires it. But
what is the need of rolling up money at the rate at which he is seeking to do
it? Why not have less, and take some time to enjoy his home, and cheer up
his wife, and form the minds of his children? Why spend himself down to
the last drop on the world, and give to the dearest friends he has only the
bitter dregs?
Much of the preaching which the pulpit and the Church have levelled at
fashionable amusements has failed of any effect at all, because wrongly put.
A cannonade has been opened upon dancing, for example, and all for
reasons that will not, in the least, bear looking into. It is vain to talk of
dancing as a sin because practised in a dying world where souls are passing
into eternity. If dancing is a sin for this reason, so is playing marbles, or
frolicking with one’s children, or enjoying a good dinner, or doing fifty
other things which nobody ever dreamed of objecting to.
If the preacher were to say that anything is a sin which uses up the
strength we need for daily duties, and leaves us fagged out and irritable at
just those times and in just those places when and where we need most to be
healthy, cheerful, and self-possessed, he would say a thing that none of his
hearers would dispute. If he should add, that dancing-parties, beginning at
ten o’clock at night and ending at four o’clock in the morning, do use up the
strength, weaken the nerves, and leave a person wholly unfit for any home
duty, he would also be saying what very few people would deny; and then
his case would be made out. If he should say that it is wrong to breathe bad
air and fill the stomach with unwholesome dainties, so as to make one
restless, ill-natured, and irritable for days, he would also say what few
would deny, and his preaching might have some hope of success.
The true manner of judging of the worth of amusements is to try them by
their effects on the nerves and spirits the day after. True amusement ought
to be, as the word indicates, recreation,—something that refreshes, turns us
out anew, rests the mind and body by change, and gives cheerfulness and
alacrity to our return to duty.
The true objection to all stimulants, alcoholic and narcotic, consists
simply in this,—that they are a form of overdraft on the nervous energy,
which helps us to use up in one hour the strength of whole days.
A man uses up all the fair, legal interest of nervous power by too much
business, too much care, or too much amusement. He has now a demand to
meet. He has a complicate account to make up, an essay or a sermon to
write, and he primes himself by a cup of coffee, a cigar, a glass of spirits.
This is exactly the procedure of a man who, having used the interest of his
money, begins to dip into the principal. The strength a man gets in this way
is just so much taken out of his life-blood; it is borrowing of a merciless
creditor, who will exact, in time, the pound of flesh nearest his heart.
Much of the irritability which spoils home happiness is the letting-down
from the over-excitement of stimulus. Some will drink coffee, when they
own every day that it makes them nervous; some will drug themselves with
tobacco, and some with alcohol, and, for a few hours of extra brightness,
give themselves and their friends many hours when amiability or
agreeableness is quite out of the question. There are people calling
themselves Christians who live in miserable thraldom, forever in debt to
Nature, forever overdrawing on their just resources, and using up their
patrimony, because they have not the moral courage to break away from a
miserable appetite.
 The same may be said of numberless indulgences of the palate, which
tax the stomach beyond its power, and bring on all the horrors of
indigestion. It is almost impossible for a confirmed dyspeptic to act like a
good Christian; but a good Christian ought not to become a confirmed
dyspeptic. Reasonable self-control, abstaining from all unseasonable
indulgence, may prevent or put an end to dyspepsia, and many suffer and
make their friends suffer only because they will persist in eating what they
know is hurtful to them.
But it is not merely in worldly business, or fashionable amusements, or
the gratification of appetite, that people are tempted to overdraw and use up
in advance their life-force. It is done in ways more insidious, because
connected with our moral and religious faculties. There are religious
exaltations beyond the regular pulse and beatings of ordinary nature, that
quite as surely gravitate downward into the mire of irritability. The ascent to
the third heaven lets even the Apostle down to a thorn in the flesh, the
messenger of Satan to buffet him.
It is the temptation of natures in which the moral faculties predominate
to overdo in the outward expression and activities of religion till they are
used up and irritable, and have no strength left to set a good example in
domestic life.
The Reverend Mr. X. in the pulpit to-day appears with the face of an
angel; he soars away into those regions of exalted devotion where his
people can but faintly gaze after him; he tells them of the victory that
overcometh the world, of an unmoved faith that fears no evil, of a serenity
of love that no outward event can ruffle; and all look after him and wonder,
and wish they could so soar.
Alas! the exaltation which inspires these sublime conceptions, these
celestial ecstasies, is a double and treble draft on Nature,—and poor Mrs.
X. knows, when she hears him preaching, that days of miserable reaction
are before her. He has been a fortnight driving before a gale of strong
excitement, doing all the time twice or thrice as much as in his ordinary
state he could, and sustaining himself by the stimulus of strong coffee. He
has preached or exhorted every night, and conversed with religious
inquirers every day, seeming to himself to become stronger and stronger,
because every day more and more excitable and excited. To his hearers,
with his flushed sunken cheek and his glittering eye, he looks like some
spiritual being just trembling on his flight for upper worlds; but to poor
Mrs. X., whose husband he is, things wear a very different aspect. Her
woman and mother instincts tell her that he is drawing on his life-capital
with both hands, and that the hours of a terrible settlement must come, and
the days of darkness will be many. He who spoke so beautifully of the
peace of a soul made perfect will not be able to bear the cry of his baby or
the pattering feet of any of the poor little X.s, who must be sent

“Anywhere, anywhere,
Out of his sight”;

he who discoursed so devoutly of perfect trust in God will be nervous about

the butcher’s bill, sure of going to ruin because both ends of the salary don’t
meet; and he who could so admiringly tell of the silence of Jesus under
provocation will but too often speak unadvisedly with his lips. Poor Mr. X.
will be morally insane for days or weeks, and absolutely incapable of
preaching Christ in the way that is the most effective, by setting Him forth
in his own daily example.
What then? must we not do the work of the Lord?
Yes, certainly; but the first work of the Lord, that for which provision is
to be made in the first place, is to set a good example as a Christian man.
Better labor for years steadily, diligently, doing every day only what the
night’s rest can repair, avoiding those cheating stimulants that overtax
Nature, and illustrating the sayings of the pulpit by the daily life in the
family, than to pass life in exaltations and depressions, resulting from
overstrained labors, supported by unnatural stimulus.
The same principles apply to hearers as to preachers. Religious services
must be judged of like amusements, by their effect on the life. If an
overdose of prayers, hymns, and sermons leaves us tired, nervous, and
cross, it is only not quite as bad as an overdose of fashionable folly.
It could be wished that in every neighborhood there might be one or two
calm, sweet, daily services which should morning and evening unite for a
few solemn moments the hearts of all as in one family, and feed with a
constant, unnoticed, daily supply the lamp of faith and love. Such are some
of the daily prayer-meetings which for eight or ten years past have held
their even tenor in some of our New England cities, and such the morning
and evening services which we are glad to see obtaining in the Episcopal
churches. Everything which brings religion into habitual contact with life,
and makes it part of a healthy, cheerful average living, we hail as a sign of a
better day. Nothing is so good for health as daily devotion. It is the best
soother of the nerves, the best antidote to care; and we trust erelong that all
Christian people will be of one mind in this, and that neighborhoods will be
families gathering daily around one altar, praying not for themselves
merely, but for each other.
The conclusion of the whole matter is this: Set apart some provision to
make merry with at home, and guard that reserve as religiously as the
priests guarded the shew-bread in the temple. However great you are,
however good, however wide the general interests that you may control,
you gain nothing by neglecting home-duties. You must leave enough of
yourself to be able to bear and forbear, give and forgive, and be a source of
life and cheerfulness around the hearthstone. The great sign given by the
Prophets of the coming of the Millennium is,—what do you suppose?—“He
shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the
children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.”
Thus much on avoiding unhealthy, irritable states.
But it still remains that a large number of people will be subject to them
unavoidably for these reasons.
First. The use of tobacco, alcohol, and other kindred stimulants, for so
many generations, has vitiated the brain and nervous system of modern
civilized races so that it is not what it was in former times. Michelet treats
of this subject quite at large in some of his late works; and we have to face
the fact of a generation born with an impaired nervous organization, who
will need constant care and wisdom to avoid unhealthy, morbid irritation.
There is a temperament called the HYPOCHONDRIAC, to which many
persons, some of them the brightest, the most interesting, the most gifted,
are born heirs,—a want of balance of the nervous powers, which tends
constantly to periods of high excitement and of consequent depression,—an
unfortunate inheritance for the possessor, though accompanied often with
the greatest talents. Sometimes, too, it is the unfortunate lot of those who
have not talents, who bear its burdens and its anguish without its rewards.
People of this temperament are subject to fits of gloom and
despondency, of nervous irritability and suffering, which darken the aspect
of the whole world to them, which present lying reports of their friends, of
themselves, of the circumstances of their life, and of all with which they
have to do.
Now the highest philosophy for persons thus afflicted is to understand
themselves and their tendencies, to know that these fits of gloom and
depression are just as much a form of disease as a fever or a toothache, to
know that it is the peculiarity of the disease to fill the mind with wretched
illusions, to make them seem miserable and unlovely to themselves, to
make their nearest friends seem unjust and unkind, to make all events
appear to be going wrong and tending to destruction and ruin.
The evils and burdens of such a temperament are half removed when a
man once knows that he has it and recognizes it for a disease, and when he
does not trust himself to speak and act in those bitter hours as if there were
any truth in what he thinks and feels and sees. He who has not attained to
this wisdom overwhelms his friends and his family with the waters of
bitterness; he stings with unjust accusations, and makes his fireside dreadful
with fancies which are real to him, but false as the ravings of fever.
A sensible person, thus diseased, who has found out what ails him, will
shut his mouth resolutely, not to give utterance to the dark thoughts that
infest his soul.
A lady of great brilliancy and wit, who was subject to these periods, once
said to me, “My dear sir, there are times when I know I am possessed of the
Devil, and then I never let myself speak.” And so this wise woman carried
her burden about with her in a determined, cheerful reticence, leaving
always the impression of a cheery, kindly temper, when, if she had spoken
out a tithe of what she thought and felt in her morbid hours, she would have
driven all her friends from her, and made others as miserable as she was
herself. She was a sunbeam, a life-giving presence in every family, by the
power of self-knowledge and self-control. Such victories as this are the
victories of real saints.
But if the victim of these glooms is once tempted to lift their heavy load
by the use of any stimulus whatever, he or she is a lost man or woman. It is
from this sad class more than any other that the vast army of drunkards and
opium-eaters is recruited. Dr. Johnson, one of the most brilliant examples of
the hypochondriac temperament which literature affords, has expressed a
characteristic of the race, in what he says of himself, that he could “practise
ABSTINENCE but not TEMPERANCE.” Hypochondriacs who begin to rely on
stimulus, almost without exception find this to be true. They cannot, they
will not be moderate. Whatever stimulant they take for relief will create an
uncontrollable appetite, a burning passion. The temperament itself lies in
the direction of insanity. It needs the most healthful, careful, even regimen
and management to keep it within the bounds of soundness; but the
introduction of stimulants deepens its gloom with the shadows of utter
despair.
All parents, in the education of their children, should look out for and
understand the signs of this temperament. It appears in early childhood; and
a child inclined to fits of depression should be marked as a subject of the
most thoughtful, painstaking physical and moral training. All over-
excitement and stimulus should be carefully avoided, whether in the way of
study, amusement, or diet. Judicious education may do much to mitigate the
unavoidable pains and penalties of this most undesirable inheritance.
The second class of persons who need wisdom in the control of their
moods is that large class whose unfortunate circumstances make it
impossible for them to avoid constantly overdoing and overdrawing upon
their nervous energies, and who therefore are always exhausted and worn
out. Poor souls, who labor daily under a burden too heavy for them, and
whose fretfulness and impatience are looked upon with sorrow, not anger,
by pitying angels. Poor mothers, with families of little children clinging
round them, and a baby that never lets them sleep; hard-working men,
whose utmost toil, day and night, scarcely keeps the wolf from the door;
and all the hard-laboring, heavy-laden, on whom the burdens of life press
far beyond their strength.
There are but two things we know of for these,—two only remedies for
the irritation that comes of these exhaustions; the habit of silence towards
men, and of speech towards God. The heart must utter itself or burst; but let
it learn to commune constantly and intimately with One always present and
always sympathizing. This is the great, the only safeguard against
fretfulness and complaint. Thus and thus only can peace spring out of
confusion, and the breaking chords of an overtaxed nature be strung anew
to a celestial harmony.
 III.

REPRESSION.

I AM going now to write on another cause of family unhappiness, more

subtile than either of those before enumerated.
In the General Confession of the Church, we poor mortals all unite in
saying two things: “We have left undone those things which we ought to
have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have
done.” These two heads exhaust the subject of human frailty.
It is the things left undone which we ought to have done, the things left
unsaid which we ought to have said, that constitute the subject I am now to
treat of.
I remember my school-day speculations over an old “Chemistry” I used
to study as a textbook, which informed me that a substance called Caloric
exists in all bodies. In some it exists in a latent state: it is there, but it affects
neither the senses nor the thermometer. Certain causes develop it, when it
raises the mercury and warms the hands. I remember the awe and wonder
with which, even then, I reflected on the vast amount of blind, deaf, and
dumb comfort which Nature had thus stowed away. How mysterious it
seemed to me that poor families every winter should be shivering, freezing,
and catching cold, when Nature had all this latent caloric locked up in her
store-closet,—when it was all around them, in everything they touched and
handled!
In the spiritual world there is an exact analogy to this. There is a great
life-giving, warming power called Love, which exists in human hearts
dumb and unseen, but which has no real life, no warming power, till set free
by expression.
Did you ever, in a raw, chilly day, just before a snow-storm, sit at work
in a room that was judiciously warmed by an exact thermometer? You do
not freeze, but you shiver; your fingers do not become numb with cold, but
you have all the while an uneasy craving for more positive warmth. You
look at the empty grate, walk mechanically towards it, and, suddenly
awaking, shiver to see that there is nothing there. You long for a shawl or
cloak; you draw yourself within yourself; you consult the thermometer, and
are vexed to find that there is nothing there to be complained of,—it is
standing most provokingly at the exact temperature that all the good books
and good doctors pronounce to be the proper thing,—the golden mean of
health; and yet perversely you shiver, and feel as if the face of an open fire
would be to you as the smile of an angel.
Such a lifelong chill, such an habitual shiver, is the lot of many natures,
which are not warm, when all ordinary rules tell them they ought to be
warm,—whose life is cold and barren and meagre,—which never see the
blaze of an open fire.
I will illustrate my meaning by a page out of my own experience.
I was twenty-one when I stood as groomsman for my youngest and
favorite sister Emily. I remember her now as she stood at the altar,—a pale,
sweet, flowery face, in a half-shimmer between smiles and tears, looking
out of vapory clouds of gauze and curls and all the vanishing mysteries of a
bridal morning.
Everybody thought the marriage such a fortunate one!—for her husband
was handsome and manly, a man of worth, of principle good as gold and
solid as adamant,—and Emmy had always been such a flossy little kitten of
a pet, so full of all sorts of impulses, so sensitive and nervous, we thought
her kind, strong, composed, stately husband made just on purpose for her.
“It was quite a Providence,” sighed all the elderly ladies, who sniffed
tenderly, and wiped their eyes, according to approved custom, during the
marriage ceremony.
I remember now the bustle of the day,—the confused whirl of white
gloves, kisses, bridemaids, and bride-cakes, the losing of trunk-keys and
breaking of lacings, the tears of mamma—God bless her!—and the jokes of
irreverent Christopher, who could, for the life of him, see nothing so very
dismal in the whole phantasmagoria, and only wished he were as well off
himself.
And so Emmy was whirled away from us on the bridal tour, when her
letters came back to us almost every day, just like herself, merry, frisky little
bits of scratches,—as full of little nonsense-beads as a glass of Champagne,
and all ending with telling us how perfect he was, and how good, and how
well he took care of her, and how happy, etc., etc.
 Then came letters from her new home. His house was not yet built; but
while it was building, they were to live with his mother, who was “such a
good woman,” and his sisters, who were also “such nice women.”
But somehow, after this, a change came over Emmy’s letters. They grew
shorter; they seemed measured in their words; and in place of sparkling
nonsense and bubbling outbursts of glee, came anxiously worded praises of
her situation and surroundings, evidently written for the sake of arguing
herself into the belief that she was extremely happy.
John, of course, was not as much with her now: he had his business to
attend to, which took him away all day, and at night he was very tired. Still
he was very good and thoughtful of her, and how thankful she ought to be!
And his mother was very good indeed, and did all for her that she could
reasonably expect,—of course she could not be like her own mamma; and
Mary and Jane were very kind,—“in their way,” she wrote, but scratched it
out, and wrote over it, “very kind indeed.” They were the best people in the
world,—a great deal better than she was; and she should try to learn a great
deal from them.
“Poor little Em!” I said to myself, “I am afraid these very nice people are
slowly freezing and starving her.” And so, as I was going up into the
mountains for a summer tour, I thought I would accept some of John’s
many invitations and stop a day or two with them on my way, and see how
matters stood. John had been known among us in college as a taciturn
fellow, but good as gold. I had gained his friendship by a regular siege,
carrying parallel after parallel, till, when I came into the fort at last, I found
the treasures worth taking.
I had little difficulty in finding Squire Evans’s house. It was the house of
the village,—a true, model, New England house,—a square, roomy, old-
fashioned mansion, which stood on a hillside, under a group of great,
breezy old elms, whose wide, wind-swung arms arched over it like a leafy
firmament. Under this bower the substantial white house, with all its
window-blinds closed, with its neat white fences all tight and trim, stood in
its faultless green turfy yard, a perfect Pharisee among houses. It looked
like a house all finished, done, completed, labelled, and set on a shelf for
preservation; but, as is usual with this kind of edifice in our dear New
England, it had not the slightest appearance of being lived in, not a door or
window open, not a wink or blink of life: the only suspicion of human
habitation was the thin, pale-blue smoke from the kitchen-chimney.
And now for the people in the house.
In making a New England visit in winter, was it ever your fortune to be
put to sleep in the glacial spare-chamber, that had been kept from time
immemorial as a refrigerator for guests,—that room which no ray of daily
sunshine and daily living ever warms, whose blinds are closed the whole
year round, whose fireplace knows only the complimentary blaze which is
kindled a few moments before bedtime in an atmosphere where you can see
your breath? Do you remember the process of getting warm in a bed of
most faultless material, with linen sheets and pillow-cases, slippery and
cold as ice? You did get warm at last, but you warmed your bed by giving
out all the heat of your own body.
Such are some families where you visit. They are of the very best
quality, like your sheets, but so cold that it takes all the vitality you have to
get them warmed up to the talking-point. You think, the first hour after your
arrival, that they must have heard some report to your disadvantage, or that
you misunderstood your letter of invitation, or that you came on the wrong
day; but no, you find in due course that you were invited, you were
expected, and they are doing for you the best they know how, and treating
you as they suppose a guest ought to be treated.
If you are a warm-hearted, jovial fellow, and go on feeling your way
discreetly, you gradually thaw quite a little place round yourself in the
domestic circle, till, by the time you are ready to leave, you really begin to
think it is agreeable to stay, and resolve that you will come again. They are
nice people; they like you; at last you have got to feeling at home with
them.
Three months after, you go to see them again, when, lo! there you are,
back again just where you were at first. The little spot which you had
thawed out is frozen over again, and again you spend all your visit in
thawing it and getting your hosts limbered and in a state for comfortable
converse.
The first evening that I spent in the wide, roomy front-parlor, with Judge
Evans, his wife, and daughters, fully accounted for the change in Emmy’s
letters. Rooms, I verily believe, get saturated with the aroma of their
spiritual atmosphere; and there are some so stately, so correct, that they
would paralyze even the friskiest kitten or the most impudent Scotch terrier.
At a glance, you perceive, on entering, that nothing but correct deportment,
an erect posture, and strictly didactic conversation is possible there.
The family, in fact, were all eminently didactic, bent on improvement,
laboriously useful. Not a good work or charitable enterprise could put forth
its head in the neighborhood, of which they were not the support and life.
Judge Evans was the stay and staff of the village and township of ——; he
bore up the pillars thereof. Mrs. Evans was known in the gates for all the
properties and deeds of the virtuous woman, as set forth by Solomon; the
heart of her husband did safely trust in her. But when I saw them, that
evening, sitting, in erect propriety, in their respective corners each side of
the great, stately fireplace, with its tall, glistening brass andirons, its mantel
adorned at either end with plated candlesticks, with the snuffer-tray in the
middle,—she so collectedly measuring her words, talking in all those well-
worn grooves of correct conversation which are designed, as the phrase
goes, to “entertain strangers,” and the Misses Evans, in the best of grammar
and rhetoric, and in most proper time and way possible, showing
themselves for what they were, most high-principled, well-informed,
intelligent women,—I set myself to speculate on the cause of the
extraordinary sensation of stiffness and restraint which pervaded me, as if I
had been dipped in some petrifying spring and was beginning to feel myself
slightly crusting over on the exterior.
This kind of conversation is such as admits quite easily of one’s carrying
on another course of thought within; and so, as I found myself like a
machine, striking in now and then in good time and tune, I looked at Judge
Evans, sitting there so serene, self-poised, and cold, and began to wonder if
he had ever been a boy, a young man,—if Mrs. Evans ever was a girl,—if
he was ever in love with her, and what he did when he was.
I thought of the lock of Emmy’s hair which I had observed in John’s
writing-desk in days when he was falling in love with her,—of sun dry little
movements in which at awkward moments I had detected my grave and
serious gentleman when I had stumbled accidentally upon the pair in
moonlight strolls or retired corners,—and wondered whether the models of
propriety before me had ever been convicted of any such human
weaknesses. Now, to be sure, I could as soon imagine the stately tongs to
walk up and kiss the shovel as conceive of any such bygone effusion in
those dignified individuals. But how did they get acquainted? how came
they ever to be married?
I looked at John, and thought I saw him gradually stiffening and
subsiding into the very image of his father. As near as a young fellow of
twenty-five can resemble an old one of sixty-two, he was growing to be
exactly like him, with the same upright carriage, the same silence and
reserve. Then I looked at Emmy: she, too, was changed,—she, the wild
little pet, all of whose pretty individualities were dear to us,—that little
unpunctuated scrap of life’s poetry, full of little exceptions referable to no
exact rule, only to be tolerated under the wide score of poetic license. Now,
as she sat between the two Misses Evans, I thought I could detect a bored,
anxious expression on her little mobile face,—an involuntary watchfulness
and self-consciousness, as if she were trying to be good on some quite new
pattern. She seemed nervous about some of my jokes, and her eye went
apprehensively to her mother-in-law in the corner; she tried hard to laugh
and make things go merrily for me; she seemed sometimes to look an
apology for me to them, and then again for them to me. For myself, I felt
that perverse inclination to shock people which sometimes comes over one
in such situations. I had a great mind to draw Emmy on to my knee and
commence a brotherly romp with her, to give John a thump on his very
upright back, and to propose to one of the Misses Evans to strike up a waltz,
and get the parlor into a general whirl, before the very face and eyes of
propriety in the corner: but “the spirits” were too strong for me; I couldn’t
do it.
I remembered the innocent, saucy freedom with which Emmy used to
treat her John in the days of their engagement,—the little ways, half loving,
half mischievous, in which she alternately petted and domineered over him.
Now she called him “Mr. Evans,” with an anxious affectation of matronly
gravity. Had they been lecturing her into these conjugal proprieties?
Probably not. I felt sure, by what I now experienced in myself, that, were I
to live in that family one week, all deviations from the one accepted pattern
of propriety would fall off, like many-colored sumach-leaves after the first
hard frost. I began to feel myself slowly stiffening, my courage getting
gently chilly. I tried to tell a story, but had to mangle it greatly, because I
felt in the air around me that parts of it were too vernacular and emphatic;
and then, as a man who is freezing makes desperate efforts to throw off the
spell, and finds his brain beginning to turn, so I was beginning to be slightly
insane, and was haunted with a desire to say some horribly improper or
wicked thing which should start them all out of their chairs. Though never
given to profane expressions, I perfectly hankered to let out a certain round,
unvarnished, wicked word, which I knew would create a tremendous
commotion on the surface of this enchanted mill-pond,—in fact, I was so
afraid that I should make some such mad demonstration, that I rose at an
early hour and begged leave to retire. Emmy sprang up with apparent relief,
and offered to get my candle and marshal me to my room.
When she had ushered me into the chilly hospitality of that stately
apartment, she seemed suddenly disenchanted. She set down the candle, ran
to me, fell on my neck, nestled her little head under my coat, laughing and
crying, and calling me her dear old boy; she pulled my whiskers, pinched
my ear, rummaged my pockets, danced round me in a sort of wild joy,
stunning me with a volley of questions, without stopping to hear the answer
to one of them; in short, the wild little elf of old days seemed suddenly to
come back to me, as I sat down and drew her on to my knee.
“It does look so like home to see you, Chris!—dear, dear home!—and
the dear old folks! There never, never was such a home!—everybody there
did just what they wanted to, didn’t they, Chris?—and we love each other,
don’t we?”
“Emmy,” said I, suddenly, and very improperly, “you aren’t happy here.”
“Not happy?” she said, with a half-frightened look,—“what makes you
say so? O, you are mistaken. I have everything to make me happy. I should
be very unreasonable and wicked, if I were not. I am very, very happy, I
assure you. Of course, you know, everybody can’t be like our folks at home.
That I should not expect, you know,—people’s ways are different,—but
then, when you know people are so good, and all that, why, of course you
must be thankful, be happy. It’s better for me to learn to control my
feelings, you know, and not give way to impulses. They are all so good
here, they never give way to their feelings,—they always do right. O, they
are quite wonderful!”
“And agreeable?” said I.
“O Chris, we mustn’t think so much of that. They certainly aren’t
pleasant and easy, as people at home are; but they are never cross, they
never scold, they always are good. And we oughtn’t to think so much of
living to be happy; we ought to think more of doing right, doing our duty,
don’t you think so?”
“All undeniable truth, Emmy; but, for all that, John seems stiff as a
ramrod, and their front-parlor is like a tomb. You mustn’t let them petrify
him.”
Her face clouded over a little.
“John is different here from what he was at our house. He has been
brought up differently,—O, entirely differently from what we were; and
when he comes back into the old house, the old business, and the old place
between his father and mother and sisters, he goes back into the old ways.
He loves me all the same, but he does not show it in the same ways, and I
must learn, you know, to take it on trust. He is very busy,—works hard all
day, and all for me; and mother says women are unreasonable that ask any
other proof of love from their husbands than what they give by working for
them all the time. She never lectures me, but I know she thought I was a
silly little petted child, and she told me one day how she brought up John.
She never petted him; she put him away alone to sleep, from the time he
was six months old; she never fed him out of his regular hours when he was
a baby, no matter how much he cried; she never let him talk baby-talk, or
have any baby-talk talked to him, but was very careful to make him speak
all his words plain from the very first; she never encouraged him to express
his love by kisses or caresses, but taught him that the only proof of love was
exact obedience. I remember John’s telling me of his running to her once
and hugging her round the neck, when he had come in without wiping his
shoes, and she took off his arms and said: ‘My son, this isn’t the best way to
show love. I should be much better pleased to have you come in quietly and
wipe your shoes than to come and kiss me when you forget to do what I
say.’ ”
“Dreadful old jade!” said I, irreverently, being then only twenty-three.
“Now, Chris, I won’t have anything to say to you, if this is the way you
are going to talk,” said Emily, pouting, though a mischievous gleam darted
into her eyes. “Really, however, I think she carried things too far, though
she is so good. I only said it to excuse John, and show how he was brought
up.”
“Poor fellow!” said I. “I know now why he is so hopelessly shut up, and
walled up. Never a warmer heart than he keeps stowed away there inside of
the fortress, with the drawbridge down and moat all round.”
“They are all warm-hearted inside,” said Emily. “Would you think she
didn’t love him? Once when he was sick, she watched with him seventeen
nights without taking off her clothes; she scarcely would eat all the time:
Jane told me so. She loves him better than she loves herself. It’s perfectly
dreadful sometimes to see how intense she is when anything concerns him;
it’s her principle that makes her so cold and quiet.”
“And a devilish one it is!” said I.
“Chris, you are really growing wicked!”
“I use the word seriously, and in good faith,” said I. “Who but the Father
of Evil ever devised such plans for making goodness hateful, and keeping
the most-heavenly part of our nature so under lock and key that for the
greater part of our lives we get no use of it? Of what benefit is a mine of
love burning where it warms nobody, does nothing but blister the soul
within with its imprisoned heat? Love repressed grows morbid, acts in a
thousand perverse ways. These three women, I’ll venture to say, are living
in the family here like three frozen islands, knowing as little of each other’s
inner life as if parted by eternal barriers of ice,—and all because a cursed
principle in the heart of the mother has made her bring them up in violence
to Nature.”
“Well,” said Emmy, “sometimes I do pity Jane; she is nearest my age,
and, naturally, I think she was something like me, or might have been. The
other day I remember her coming in looking so flushed and ill that I
couldn’t help asking if she were unwell. The tears came into her eyes; but
her mother looked up, in her cool, business-like way, and said, in her dry
voice,—
“ ‘Jane, what’s the matter?’
“ ‘O, my head aches dreadfully, and I have pains in all my limbs!’
“I wanted to jump and run to do something for her,—you know at our
house we feel that a sick person must be waited on,—but her mother only
said, in the same dry way,—
“ ‘Well, Jane, you’ve probably got a cold; go into the kitchen and make
yourself some good boneset tea, soak your feet in hot water, and go to bed
at once’; and Jane meekly departed.
 “I wanted to spring and do these things for her; but it’s curious, in this
house I never dare offer to do anything; and mother looked at me, as she
went out, with a significant nod,—
“ ‘That’s always my way; if any of the children are sick, I never coddle
them; it’s best to teach them to make as light of it as possible.’ ”
“Dreadful!” said I.
“Yes, it is dreadful,” said Emmy, drawing her breath, as if relieved that
she might speak her mind; “it’s dreadful to see these people, who I know
love each other, living side by side and never saying a loving, tender word,
never doing a little loving thing,—sick ones crawling off alone like sick
animals, persisting in being alone, bearing everything alone. But I won’t let
them; I will insist on forcing my way into their rooms. I would go and sit
with Jane, and pet her and hold her hand and bathe her head, though I knew
it made her horridly uncomfortable at first; but I thought she ought to learn
to be petted in a Christian way, when she was sick. I will kiss her too,
sometimes, though she takes it just like a cat that isn’t used to being
stroked, and calls me a silly girl; but I know she is getting to like it. What is
the use of people’s loving each other in this horridly cold, stingy, silent
way? If one of them were dangerously ill now, or met with any serious
accident, I know there would be no end to what the others would do for her;
if one of them were to die, the others would be perfectly crushed: but it
would all go inward,—drop silently down into that dark, cold, frozen well;
they couldn’t speak to each other; they couldn’t comfort each other; they
have lost the power of expression; they absolutely can’t.”
“Yes,” said I, “they are like the fakirs who have held up an arm till it has
become stiffened,—they cannot now change its position; like the poor
mutes, who, being deaf, have become dumb through disuse of the organs of
speech. Their education has been like those iron suits of armor into which
little boys were put in the Middle Ages, solid, inflexible, put on in
childhood, enlarged with every year’s growth, till the warm human frame
fitted the mould as if it had been melted and poured into it. A person
educated in this way is hopelessly crippled, never will be what he might
have been.”
“O, don’t say that, Chris; think of John; think how good he is.”
“I do think how good he is,"—with indignation,—“and how few know it,
too. I think; that, with the tenderest, truest, gentlest heart, the utmost
appreciation of human friendship, he has passed in the world for a cold,
proud, selfish man. If your frank, impulsive, incisive nature had not
unlocked gates and opened doors, he would never have known the love of
woman: and now he is but half disenchanted; he every day tends to go back
to stone.”
“But I sha’n’t let him; O, indeed, I know the danger! I shall bring him
out. I shall work on them all. I know they are beginning to love me a good
deal: in the first place, because I belong to John, and everything belonging
to him is perfect; and in the second place—”
“In the second place, because they expect to weave, day after day, the
fine cobweb lines of their cold system of repression around you, which will
harden and harden, and tighten and tighten, till you are as stiff and shrouded
as any of them. You remind me of our poor little duck: don’t you remember
him?”
“Yes, poor fellow! how he would stay out, and swim round and round,
while the pond kept freezing and freezing, and his swimming-place grew
smaller and smaller every day; but he was such a plucky little fellow that
—”
“That at last we found him one morning frozen tight in, and he has
limped ever since on his poor feet.”
“O, but I won’t freeze in,” she said, laughing.
“Take care, Emmy! You are sensitive, approbative, delicately organized;
your whole nature inclines you to give way and yield to the nature of those
around you. One little lone duck such as you, however warm-blooded,
light-hearted, cannot keep a whole pond from freezing. While you have any
influence, you must use it all to get John away from these surroundings,
where you can have him to yourself.”
“O, you know we are building our house; we shall go to housekeeping
soon.”
“Where? Close by, under the very guns of this fortress, where all your
housekeeping, all your little management, will be subject to daily
inspection.”
“But mamma never interferes, never advises,—unless I ask advice.”
“No, but she influences; she lives, she looks, she is there; and while she
is there, and while your home is within a stone’s throw, the old spell will be
on your husband, on your children, if you have any; you will feel it in the
air; it will constrain, it will sway you, it will rule your house, it will bring
up your children.”
“O no! never! never! I never could! I never will! If God should give me
a dear little child, I will not let it grow up in these hateful ways!”
“Then, Emmy, there will be a constant, still, undefined, but real friction
of your life-power from the silent grating of your wishes and feelings on the
cold, positive millstone of their opinion; it will be a life-battle with a quiet,
invisible, pervading spirit, who will never show himself in fair fight, but
who will be around you in the very air you breathe, at your pillow when
you lie down and when you rise. There is so much in these friends of yours
noble, wise, severely good,—their aims are so high, their efficiency so
great, their virtues so many,—that they will act upon you with the force of a
conscience, subduing, drawing, insensibly constraining you into their
moulds. They have stronger wills, stronger natures than yours; and between
the two forces of your own nature and theirs you will be always oscillating,
so that you will never show what you can do, working either in your own
way or yet in theirs: your life will be a failure.”
“O Chris, why do you discourage me?”
“I am trying tonic treatment, Emily; I am showing you a real danger; I
am rousing you to flee from it. John is making money fast; there is no
reason why he should always remain buried in this town. Use your
influence as they do,—daily, hourly, constantly,—to predispose him to take
you to another sphere. Do not always shrink and yield; do not conceal and
assimilate and endeavor to persuade him and yourself that you are happy;
do not put the very best face to him on it all; do not tolerate his relapses
daily and hourly into his habitual, cold, inexpressive manner; and don’t lay
aside your own little impulsive, out-spoken ways. Respect your own nature,
and assert it; woo him, argue with him; use all a woman’s weapons to keep
him from falling back into the old Castle Doubting where he lived till you
let him out. Dispute your mother’s hateful dogma, that love is to be taken
for granted without daily proof between lovers; cry down latent caloric in
the market; insist that the mere fact of being a wife is not enough,—that the
words spoken once, years ago, are not enough,—that love needs new leaves
every summer of life, as much as your elm-trees, and new branches to grow
broader and wider, and new flowers at the root to cover the ground.”
 “O, but I have heard that there is no surer way to lose love than to be
exacting, and that it never comes for a woman’s reproaches.”
“All true as Gospel, Emmy. I am not speaking of reproaches, or of
unreasonable self-assertion, or of ill-temper,—you could not use any of
these forces, if you would, you poor little chick! I am speaking now of the
highest duty we owe our friends, the noblest, the most sacred,—that of
keeping their own nobleness, goodness, pure and incorrupt. Thoughtless,
instinctive, unreasoning love and self-sacrifice, such as many women long
to bestow on husband and children, soil and lower the very objects of their
love. You may grow saintly by self-sacrifice; but do your husband and
children grow saintly by accepting it without return? I have seen a verse
which says,—

‘They who kneel at woman’s shrine

Breathe on it as they bow.’

Is not this true of all unreasoning love and self-devotion? If we let our
friend become cold and selfish and exacting without a remonstrance, we are
no true lover, no true friend. Any good man soon learns to discriminate
between the remonstrance that comes from a woman’s love to his soul, her
concern for his honor, her anxiety for his moral development, and the
pettish cry which comes from her own personal wants. It will be your own
fault, if, for lack of anything you can do, your husband relapses into these
cold, undemonstrative habits which have robbed his life of so much beauty
and enjoyment. These dead, barren ways of living are as unchristian as they
are disagreeable; and you, as a good little Christian sworn to fight
heroically under Christ’s banner, must make headway against this sort of
family Antichrist, though it comes with a show of superior sanctity and self-
sacrifice. Remember, dear, that the Master’s family had its outward tokens
of love as well as its inward life. The beloved leaned on His bosom; and the
traitor could not have had a sign for his treachery, had there not been a daily
kiss at meeting and parting with His children.”
“I am glad you have said all this,” said Emily, “because now I feel
stronger for it. It does not now seem so selfish for me to want what it is
better for John to give. Yes, I must seek what will be best for him.”
And so the little one, put on the track of self-sacrifice, began to see her
way clearer, as many little women of her sort do. Make them look on self-
assertion as one form of martyrdom, and they will come into it.
But, for all my eloquence on this evening, the house was built in the
selfsame spot as projected; and the family life went on, under the shadow of
Judge Evans’s elms, much as if I had not spoken. Emmy became mother of
two fine, lovely boys, and waxed dimmer and fainter; while with her
physical decay came increasing need of the rule in the household of
mamma and sisters, who took her up energetically on eagles’ wings, and
kept her house, and managed her children: for what can be done when a
woman hovers half her time between life and death?
At last I spoke out to John, that the climate and atmosphere were too
severe for her who had become so dear to him,—to them all; and then they
consented that the change much talked of and urged, but always opposed by
the parents, should be made.
John bought a pretty cottage in our neighborhood, and brought his wife
and boys; and the effect of change of moral atmosphere verified all my
predictions. In a year we had our own blooming, joyous, impulsive little
Emily once more,—full of life, full of cheer, full of energy,—looking to the
ways of her household,—the merry companion of her growing boys,—the
blithe empress over her husband, who took to her genial sway as in the old
happy days of courtship. The nightmare was past, and John was as joyous
as any of us in his freedom. As Emmy said, he was turned right side out for
life; and we all admired the pattern. And that is the end of my story.
And now for the moral,—and that is, that life consists of two parts,—
Expression and Repression,—each of which has its solemn duties. To love,
joy, hope, faith, pity, belongs the duty of expression: to anger, envy, malice,
revenge, and all uncharitableness, belongs the duty of repression.
Some very religious and moral people err by applying repression to both
classes alike. They repress equally the expression of love and of hatred, of
pity and of anger. Such forget one great law, as true in the moral world as in
the physical,—that repression lessens and deadens. Twice or thrice mowing
will kill off the sturdiest crop of weeds; the roots die for want of expression.
A compress on a limb will stop its growing; the surgeon knows this, and
puts a tight bandage around a tumor; but what if we put a tight bandage
about the heart and lungs, as some young ladies of my acquaintance do,—or
bandage the feet, as they do in China? And what if we bandage a nobler
inner faculty, and wrap love in grave-clothes?
 But again there are others, and their number is legion,—perhaps you and
I, reader, may know something of it in ourselves,—who have an instinctive
habit of repression in regard to all that is noblest and highest within them,
which they do not feel in their lower and more unworthy nature.
It comes far easier to scold our friend in an angry moment than to say
how much we love, honor, and esteem him in a kindly mood. Wrath and
bitterness speak themselves and go with their own force; love is shame-
faced, looks shyly out of the window, lingers long at the door-latch.
How much freer utterance among many good Christians have anger,
contempt, and censoriousness, than tenderness and love! I hate is said loud
and with all our force. I love is said with a hesitating voice and blushing
cheek.
In an angry mood we do an injury to a loving heart with good, strong,
free emphasis; but we stammer and hang back when our diviner nature tells
us to confess and ask pardon. Even when our heart is broken with
repentance, we haggle and linger long before we can

“Throw away the worser part of it.”

How many live a stingy and niggardly life in regard to their richest
inward treasures! They live with those they love dearly, whom a few more
words and deeds expressive of this love would make so much happier,
richer, and better; and they cannot, will not, turn the key and give it out.
People who in their very souls really do love, esteem, reverence, almost
worship each other, live a barren, chilly life side by side, busy, anxious,
preoccupied, letting their love go by as a matter of course, a last year’s
growth, with no present buds and blossoms.
Are there not sons and daughters who have parents living with them as
angels unawares,—husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, in whom the
material for a beautiful life lies locked away in unfruitful silence,—who
give time to everything but the cultivation and expression of mutual love?
The time is coming, they think, in some far future, when they shall find
leisure to enjoy each other, to stop and rest side by side, to discover to each
other these hidden treasures which lie idle and unused.
Alas! time flies and death steals on, and we reiterate the complaint of
one in Scripture,—“It came to pass, while thy servant was busy hither and
thither, the man was gone.”
The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds
left undone. “She never knew how I loved her.” “He never knew what he
was to me.” “I always meant to make more of our friendship.” “I did not
know what he was to me till he was gone.” Such words are the poisoned
arrows which cruel Death shoots backward at us from the door of the
sepulchre.
How much more we might make of our family life, of our friendships, if
every secret thought of love blossomed into a deed! We are not now
speaking merely of personal caresses. These may or may not be the best
language of affection. Many are endowed with a delicacy, a fastidiousness
of physical organization, which shrinks away from too much of these,
repelled and overpowered. But there are words and looks and little
observances, thoughtfulnesses, watchful little attentions, which speak of
love, which make it manifest, and there is scarce a family that might not be
richer in heart-wealth for more of them.
It is a mistake to suppose that relations must of course love each other
because they are relations. Love must be cultivated, and can be increased by
judicious culture, as wild fruits may double their bearing under the hand of
a gardener; and love can dwindle and die out by neglect, as choice flower-
seeds planted in poor soil dwindle and grow single.
Two causes in our Anglo-Saxon nature prevent this easy faculty and flow
of expression which strike one so pleasantly in the Italian or the French life:
the dread of flattery, and a constitutional shyness.
“I perfectly longed to tell So-and-so how I admired her, the other day,”
says Miss X.
“And why in the world didn’t you tell her?”
“O, it would seem like flattery, you know.”
Now what is flattery?
Flattery is insincere praise given from interested motives, not the sincere
utterance to a friend of what we deem good and lovely in him.
And so, for fear of nattering, these dreadfully sincere people go on side
by side with those they love and admire, giving them all the time the
impression of utter indifference. Parents are so afraid of exciting pride and
vanity in their children by the expression of their love and approbation, that
a child sometimes goes sad and discouraged by their side, and learns with
surprise, in some chance way, that they are proud and fond of him. There
are times when the open expression of a father’s love would be worth more
than church or sermon to a boy; and his father cannot utter it, will not show
it.
The other thing that represses the utterances of love is the characteristic
shyness of the Anglo-Saxon blood. Oddly enough, a race born of two
demonstrative, out-spoken, nations—the German and the French—has an
habitual reserve that is like neither. There is a powerlessness of utterance in
our blood that we should fight against, and struggle outward towards
expression. We can educate ourselves to it, if we know and feel the
necessity; we can make it a Christian duty, not only to love, but to be
loving,—not only to be true friends, but to show ourselves friendly. We can
make ourselves say the kind things that rise in our hearts and tremble back
on our lips,—do the gentle and helpful deeds which we long to do and
shrink back from; and, little by little, it will grow easier,—the love spoken
will bring back the answer of love,—the kind deed will bring back a kind
deed in return,—till the hearts in the family-circle, instead of being so many
frozen, icy islands, shall be full of warm airs and echoing bird-voices
answering back and forth with a constant melody of love.