This is great, and thank you very much.  Typos face palm  I am now getting an error stating
IndexError                                Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-43-b5a747e0c45e> in <module>()
     19                                                                                                valid_loader,
     20                                                                                                epochs = epochs,
---> 21                                                                                                learning_rate = learning_rate)
     22 print("--- Time taken to train = %s seconds ---" % (time.time() - vanilla_rnn_start_time))
     23 #test_accuracy = test(vanilla_rnn_model, DEVICE, test_iter)

4 frames
/usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages/torch/nn/modules/rnn.py in forward(self, input, hx)
    247             input = cast(Tensor, input)
    248             batch_sizes = None
--> 249             max_batch_size = input.size(0) if self.batch_first else input.size(1)
    250             sorted_indices = None
    251             unsorted_indices = None

IndexError: Dimension out of range (expected to be in range of [-1, 0], but got 1)

Based on this post I think it is coming from the way i am creating either my output or predicted objects.  I tried changing predictived variable from:
_, predicted = torch.max(output, 1)

to both
predicted = torch.round(output.squeeze())
#AND
_, predicted = torch.round(output.squeeze())

But get the same error.  Any thoughts? Thanks for your continued support!!