A person from Porlock

Keats's Samuel Taylor Coleridge's introduction to his poem Kubla Khan.

"In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill
health, had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock
and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and
Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an
anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he
fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading
the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in
Purchas's Pilgrimage: "Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace
to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten
miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall." The
Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep,
at least of the external senses, during which time he has the
most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less
than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be
called composition in which all the images rose up before him
as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent
expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of
effort. On awakening he appeared to himself to have a
distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink,
and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that
are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately
called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained
by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found,
to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he
still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general
purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight
or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed
away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a
stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration
of the latter!"